Thousands of Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke books burned by racists in Canadian schools

The fire of nearly 5,000 books in the schools of Canada, including comics Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke, considering that they are spreading stereotypes about indigenous peoples, reopened the debate on whether these old comics fell into racism and should now be banned or changed.

Radio Canada unveiled this action by “purification by flames”, Which took place in 2019 and was adopted by the school board of a 30 French Catholic schools in Ontario, as a “gesture of reconciliation with the First Nations”.

Canada is embroiled in a process of confrontation with its racist past and the cultural genocide it practiced with its original inhabitants, which includes the recent discovery of the remains of hundreds of Indigenous Canadian children in a former school residence where the aborigines were forcibly interned for nearly 80 years.

This is not the first time that these accounts have been accused of racism. The Asterix comics, for example, underwent changes in the portrayal of black characters (by reducing the color and size of their huge red lips) when they were re-released in the United States in 2020, according to publisher Papercutz. .

Other requests and questions

For its part, “Tintin in Congo” was brought to justice in Belgium by a Congolese citizen who unsuccessfully asked for restrictions on the distribution of the work.

The lawsuit was dismissed by a ruling which ruled out that the content of the work could be considered “racist” in the context of its time. “The comic was not racist in 1931 (when it was first published), although that may be in light of the current mentality,” the publisher’s defense attorney explained.

The court also did not agree to include, as the plaintiff claims, a warning text on the content, which is happening with this UK-specific comic by court order.

Adding an explanatory message about the historical context is one of the solutions found when reading or viewing works that shock the current mentality by reflecting the stereotypes of the time in which they were conceived.

This is the case of the HBO platform, which added as an introduction to “Carried away by the wind” (1939) the explanation of the university doctor and specialist in cinema Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago). According to him, “this epic drama of 1939 must be seen in its original form, contextualized and debated”.

“Treating the world through the prism of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery and its legacy of racial inequality,” admits this expert. But he still believes “important that classic Hollywood films are available in their original form.”

Likewise, other companies such as Disney include the tag “this program is presented as originally created, may contain outdated cultural representations” in old classics which contain nods and details that in the eyes of the 21st century they would be considered racist and outdated.

The case of “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), by DW Griffith, is paradigmatic, a masterpiece for its cinematographic achievements whose screening has been canceled several times in the United States for having glorified the xenophobic organization white Ku Klux Klan and show black people as bad guys or fools in the movie.

But you don’t have to go decades back to find examples of racism in cultural pieces and in recent times this has sparked controversy, for example, the use of terms like “nigger” (black) by American rappers, unaware that this word Because of its racist past, it still hurts many African Americans.

Another controversial example can be found in rock band Guns N’Roses, which omitted from the 2018 re-release of “Appetite for Destruction” (1987) the song “One in a Million”, in which singer Axl Rose performed. so castigated. “Police and black people”, against “immigrants and queers” who went to their country to “spread a fucking disease”.

EFE