What makes material offensive?

Bartholomew said:

I'd love for the people offended by this particular archetype to say what about it offends them. If I read a story with a black protagonist, who had a, um, Magical Gringo, I wouldn't really have a problem with it.

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Well, Spike Lee believes it is an extension of the "Happy Sambo" stereotype.

http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v29.n21/story3.html

Bartholomew said:

Any character with magical abilities, black skin, and an impact on the story is racist? I don't buy it.

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In my opinion, and you folks can tell me if that's a shared opinion or not, it's not just any black character with magical abilities - especially in a Fantasy novel since, well, that's pretty much everybody in a Fantasy novel.

What it is, is the one-dimensional magical black character that comes along for the sole purpose of helping the protagonist (who's probably white, hence the problem), and has no other qualities. They exist not as a person or a character, but as a flat plot device to do nothing more then show the protagonist "the way" (to generalize). I would also say what makes it a potential hot-button stereotype is that this character is the only one within said story that has this apparent magical ability.

You also see this quite frequently with First Nations people in novels.

What is seen as offensive is the idea that these one-dimensional beings have ONLY the ability to help whitey along, that's their sole purpose.

I'm not saying now that I'm offended by such things, other then the fact that it's a piss-poor way of furthering along the plot (simply because I'm a tough broad and it's hard to get my goat up over anything ).

DancingMaenid said:

But that doesn't mean that if I write a book that contains horribly racist stereotypes, for example, that it's not racist unless I wrote the book with racist intentions. It's still racist regardless.

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I agree. I once came across a kid's book in a German library that meets the criteria. It was written by Herge, author of the famous Tintin comics, and was also a comic. It depicted three white children who somehow landed in Africa, where they are attcked and captured by a tribe of stereotypical primitive African guys: grass skirts, bulbous red lips, war-paint, bones in their hair, spears, et al. They are locked in a grass hut and fed till they get fat; the African warriors muttering things about fat-fat-fat, to show that they are going to eat the kids when they get fat enough.

When they are fat, they are taken outside and tied to a coconut tree, while a fire is lit and the Africans dance around the fire waving spears. There''s a big cauldron on the fire.

Just as they are about to drag the kids to the fire, however, a tribe of monkeys start pelting the cannibals with coconuts and free the kids. They run to the ocean, and there a big machine-thingee emergess and starts shooting magical rays at the cannibals. The cannibals believe irt is magic and bow down and start worshipping the kids.

My son borrowed this book from the library and I was horrified; and I am not easily offended, as I said before. But your worst African stereotype was in there, and having known how this affected me as a child I didn't want this stuff circulated in Germany. I complained to the library and they pulled the book, but noit without saying it was just harmless fun.

Harmless! For years, as a child, I truly believed that Africa was filled with people in grass skirts dancing around fires, because that was the stereotype passed around at the time.

When I went to England at the age of 10, on my way to boarding school, there was a bunch of us new girls in a taxi, telling each other where we came from. There was a white girl names Angela R. who said: I'm from Uganda, that's in Africa. And I was flabbergasted. I truly had no idea that there were white people in Africa at all; I thought of it as a primitive place where everyone lived in mud huts.

That's the only time I can truly say I was offended by a book.

Now, I'm sure that Herge didn't intend to insult Africans (I prefer the word insult to offend, actually) and I'm not even going to say that he's racist. But that book -- it made me shudder. Thank goodness it's out of print.
By the way, they actualy gave me the book -- I still have it, somewhere!
Something like that would never be published in English today, and it's now out of print in German.
Here's the cover of it.

One must recall the mentality of the age in which something was written, and judge authors by the standards of their age. At the same time, racist stuff shouldn't be in kids' hands.

I had a problem with lovely books written by Maj Lindman for kids in the thirties/forties...i'd read the Snip Snap and Snur series and Flicka Dicka Ricka in the early sixties and bought them for my kids. Thought they were innocent, but it turned out too innocent, for every book was the dear little children helping the weird old man next door and going into his house to cheer him up, or wandering into the woods and knocking on the door of a frightened old woman to bring her along on an adventure...erm...not what you want your kids to think is acceptable daily behavior.

Bartholomew said:

Link-hopping from the two links MacAllister posted, I found a website that has categorized a massive number of tropes.

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Don't go in there! You'll lose days, nay, weeks of your life!

IdiotsRUs said:

Don't go in there! You'll lose days, nay, weeks of your life!

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I clicked it.

What day is it?

though I honestly find cultural correctness a pain in the arse, I consider it iffy to have any character around who has no purpose other than to orbit around the MC either to help him or her or to get in his or her way. then it turns into a bad '80s' movie.

to get into a specific '80's movie as an example, Labirynth where the MC's friends don't really seem to have any existence except to help her out, likewise the villain does everything her does in the movie because of her.

though if you do go that route, make it only one character revolving around your MC and make that character interesting.