KelliWolfe said:
Had Wilder been racist herself and promoted or endorsed the opinions of the third parties whose conversations she reported in the books that are causing all the fuss, then I could certainly understand the reasoning behind this. The award name wasn't stripped from her because of what she said or thought, though, but for what she reported others saying, despite it being fairly clear from the context and in some instances stated outright that neither she nor her father approved of those things.
Yes, but the way fiction conveys cultural values (of all types) is too complex to boil down to whether the narrator/characters explicitly endorse those values, IMO. There's a complicated interplay among the narrator's tone, explicit versus implicit endorsements, the way the plot and character development lean on values, the reader's established attitudes toward the characters who espouse values, and probably other elements I'm not thinking of. For instance, if an utterly loathsome character makes a racist remark, the reader is probably likely to see that remark as bad, even if the narrator doesn't point out that it's bad. But what if a beloved character says or does something racist? That might be a murkier situation.
In the
Little House books, both Ma and Pa -- the central positive adult figures in Laura's life -- do/say racist things. Laura, as a narrator, is both a child and a product of her time, so she doesn't pause to reflect, "Wow, Pa wore blackface, and that's racist! Bummer!" That kind of explicitly critical reaction obviously would not be convincing from her character. But there's also no implicit critique of that moment. It's just presented as delightful, harmless fun, which is probably an accurate reflection of how people like Laura felt about minstrelsy and blackface, the term "darky," etc., in the 1880s. Ingalls Wilder is not going to critique racism she doesn't see as such. But from the modern perspective, Pa's blackface pulls the moral rug out from under the character we've been leaning on as the counterpoint to Ma's racism toward Native Americans.
Considering Pa's resistance to Ma's racism toward Native Americans separately, what if readers like Ma more than Pa? As a young child, I found Pa a little scary, but I loved Ma.
And some of the ways Laura expresses her own more positive attitudes toward Native Americans are still problematic, in a noble-savage kind of way.
It's all rather knotted and difficult, and a child reader may consciously ignore the messiness while unconsciously absorbing the values portrayed:
Yeah, saying an entire group of people should die might not be nice, but you can think that sort of thing and still be a good person overall, and something like blackface is really no big deal.
All of the above is me thinking through the books as something I read myself as a child and could read to my kids. I'm white, and so are my kids. But the U.S.'s children are "majority minority" these days, so there's no good reason to focus on white kids' experience of reading these books. It just happens to be the perspective I have direct access to.
So ... yeah. I think books are always embedded in culture and tend to propagate culture in really complicated ways that are hard to tease out -- hard even to
notice, in some cases. Older books like Ingalls Wilder's tend to be fascinating repositories of past cultural values, which makes them important historical artifacts. But they're
living artifacts, capable of seeding their values into the future. Art has tremendous power that way, and that property is well recognized when it comes to books: "positive messages" tend to play a big part in children's literature, especially in books written for younger kids. But books can convey all kinds of ideas in addition to the values they've been consciously designed to instill. Those subtle messages are not easily recognized, controlled, or banished, IMO. Rather, they live inside books in the same messy, contradictory, uncomfortable ways they're present in culture itself.
*Here are photos of the minstrelsy scene from my childhood copy of Little Town on the Prairie. I don't personally think the illustration is desirable to embed in a post, so I'm just going to link to it here and here. If you follow the first link, you'll see an ink illustration of five men dancing in blackface, with associated text. The second link is text only.