{"id":37871,"date":"2017-04-09T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-04-09T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37871"},"modified":"2019-12-30T13:22:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T18:22:52","slug":"qotd-re-assessing-the-pulp-eras-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/09\/qotd-re-assessing-the-pulp-eras-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Re-assessing the pulp era’s racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The skepticism I\u2019m now developing about ascriptions of racism in pulp fiction really began, I think, when I learned that it had become fashionable to denigrate Rudyard Kipling\u2019s Kim<\/em> and other India stories as racist. This is clearly sloppy thinking at work. Kim<\/em> was deeply respectful of its non-European characters, especially the Pathan swashbuckler Mahbub Ali and Teshoo Lama. Indeed, the wisdom and compassion of Kipling\u2019s lama impressed me so greatly as a child that I think it founded my lifelong interest in and sympathy with Buddhism.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t begin thinking really critically about race in pulp fiction until I read Tarzan and the Castaways<\/em> a few years ago and noticed something curious about the way Burroughs and his characters used the adjective \u201cwhite\u201d (applied to people). That is: while it appeared on the surface to be a racial distinction, it was actually a culturist one. In Burroughs\u2019s terms of reference (at least as of 1939), \u201cwhite\u201d is actually code for \u201ccivilized\u201d; the distinction between \u201ccivilized\u201d and \u201csavage\u201d is actually more important than white\/nonwhite, and non-Europeans can become constructively \u201cwhite\u201d by exhibiting civilized virtues.<\/p>\n

Realizing this caused me to review my assumptions about racial attitudes in Burroughs\u2019s time. I found myself asking whether the use of \u201cwhite\u201d as code for \u201ccivilized\u201d was prejudice or pragmatism. Because there was this about Burrough\u2019s European characters: (1) in their normal environments, the correlation between \u201ccivilized\u201d and \u201cwhite\u201d would have been pretty strong, and (2) none of them seemed to have any trouble treating nonwhite but civilized characters with respect. In fact, in Burroughs\u2019s fiction, fair dealing with characters who are black, brown, green, red, or gorilla-furred is the most consistent virtue of the white gentleman.<\/p>\n

I concluded that, given the information available to a typical European in 1939, it might very well be that using \u201cwhite\u201d as code for \u201ccivilized\u201d was pragmatically reasonable, and that the reflex we have today of ascribing all racially-correlated labels to actually racist beliefs is actually unfair to Burroughs and his characters!<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Reading racism into pulp fiction”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2010-01-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The skepticism I\u2019m now developing about ascriptions of racism in pulp fiction really began, I think, when I learned that it had become fashionable to denigrate Rudyard Kipling\u2019s Kim and other India stories as racist. This is clearly sloppy thinking at work. Kim was deeply respectful of its non-European characters, especially the Pathan swashbuckler Mahbub […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,32,7,23,41],"tags":[262,1235,99,1339],"class_list":["post-37871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-books","category-history","category-india","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-esr","tag-racism","tag-rudyardkipling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9QP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53870,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37871\/revisions\/53870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}