The CBB :: View topic - Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?

‘I’m awfully glad to hear that the piccaninny is going strong and getting fat.'

Pickaninny (also picaninny or piccaninny) is a potentially offensive derogatory term in English which refers to children of black descent or a racial caricature thereof. It is a pidgin word form, which may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino (an affectionate term derived from pequeno, "little"), though may instead be derived from the Zulu word "pikinini" meaning "small child." The term has also been used in the past to describe aboriginal Australians, although it is now rarely used and is not viewed as offensive as in other countries.

‘Awful little beggars!’ he said as they dispersed. ‘They’re nearly as bad as the natives at Port Said.

I was skimming Dick's letter about Captain Carrick in Chalet and was struck by his use of a now-offensive racial term to deignate Joey!

Quote:

‘I’m awfully glad to hear that the piccaninny is going strong and getting fat.'

This is the Wikipedia definition of the term:

Quote:

(also picaninny or piccaninny) is a potentially offensive derogatory term

Boris Johnson has apologised for referring to black people as "piccaninnies" and talking about "watermelon smiles".
During a debate for the London mayoral contest on Monday, the Conservative candidate said he was "sad" that people had been offended but insisted the words had been taken out of context.

In a column published in the Daily Telegraph six years ago, Johnson mocked Tony Blair's globetrotting: "What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies," he wrote. It also mentioned "watermelon smiles".

At the debate, sponsored by the Evening Standard, Michael Eboda, former editor of New Nation, said that some of Johnson's writings had been offensive. "These things are an extremely big obstacle to being able to work with what is 12% of London's population," he said. Johnson responded: "I feel sad that people have been offended by those words and I apologise for them."

Lord Ouseley - the former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, who recently wrote to the Tory leader, David Cameron, expressing concern about Johnson, said: "I personally recognise that you have to move on, but there are other people who he will have to convince."

I've never before heard the term used affectionately for 'child' without any racial inference - that's interesting, and news to me.

and I'm sure there are more than a few throwaway lines about "the natives", too

I seem to remember that 'piccanninny' or 'pickney' was used quite naturally in the early 1950s as a term for any baby or small child, with no racial over/undertones or pejorative intentions at all.

Juliet had grown up in the class of Anglo-Indian society that considers the English the only nation worth mentioning, and her training in a Hill school, where nine-tenths of the girls were Eurasians who looked down on their native cousins with a bitter contempt, had helped to foster this feeling.

Unfortunately, most of what we do hear about India not only has elements of racism, but classism too. We get Dick's comments about beggars, and I'm sure there are more than a few throwaway lines about "the natives", too, but we never hear anyone's thoughts on the upper echelons of society. I suspect, though, that only fairly Westernised - or Britishised - PoC would have had a chance to really have been seen as equal.

Slightly OT, but the descriptions of the various "Peoples of the World" stalls in Carola are all kinds of awful. The Maori stall in particular squicks me every time.

I think it is a question of context.

Certainly, EBD's writings are remarkably open and cosmopolitan in comparison with many of the writers of her time. The pre-war works of Agatha Christie, for example, are casually anti-Semitic, not to mention patronising and ill-informed about the working class, and don't get me started on Bulldog Drummond etc!

and with words like Anglo-Indian, she has to get them wrong, or what would we talk about on here? :lol:

Yes, 'Uncle Tom' was a good example of that, Laura. What Stowe portrayed as a decent man of high integrity and courage became a byword in the Civil Rights Movement for someone too afraid to challenge the racial status quo.

“Well done, you! That’s the best notion yet! Mrs Maynard ought to be able to advise us if anyone can. She’s been a Head Girl herself – and when the school was half full of foreigners! I’ll bet she had some rum knots to cut; and then she’s always kept up with the school.”

If someone in Tyrol or Swiss days'd referred to the school as being "Half full of foreigners" then they'd've immediately been told not to be so rude.

I think Tom might just have meant that having mixed nationalities/languages/cultures would have added to the difficulty of ruling the school,

I assume we all understand EBD, with her wide interest in foreignness and her unusual openness to other religious and cultural views, was not likely to have consciously intended to be racist, but that she was a little-travelled woman living in a largely monocultural and monoracial society and reflecting its views in the unconscious assumptions of some of her writing. That is what is showing in incidents like Joyce Linton and co bullying Miss Norman by dressing up as ‘savages’ by back-combing their hair to make it ‘fuzzy’ and dancing and grunting. It’s not that a bunch of silly teenagers have come up with their own idea of how other cultures live, it’s the fact that they apparently derived some of their information about the ‘uncivilised’ from the Second Form geography book. This is the culture EBD lived in and reflects. I don’t see any harm in teasing that out from time to time, the way we have often done on here about her gender assumptions. After all, it does no damage to the work of a writer of whom we are all enormously fond.

Author:	Sunglass [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 8:00 am ]
Post subject:	Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I was skimming Dick's letter about Captain Carrick in Chalet and was struck by his use of a now-offensive racial term to deignate Joey! Quote: ‘I’m awfully glad to hear that the piccaninny is going strong and getting fat.' This is the Wikipedia definition of the term: Quote: Pickaninny (also picaninny or piccaninny) is a potentially offensive derogatory term in English which refers to children of black descent or a racial caricature thereof. It is a pidgin word form, which may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino (an affectionate term derived from pequeno, "little"), though may instead be derived from the Zulu word "pikinini" meaning "small child." The term has also been used in the past to describe aboriginal Australians, although it is now rarely used and is not viewed as offensive as in other countries. It's probably fair to say that the word was not at the time of writing considered anywhere near as offensive as it subsequently became. Wiki, for example, says Graham Greene used it neutrally to mean 'African child' throughout a 1935 travel book. The Beano had a cartoon 'piccaninny' on the front cover but dropped it by the end of WWII. More modern usages (like Enoch Powell's infamous 'rivers of blood' speech in 1968) use it as a deliberate slur. EBD was probably using it as casually as she once or twice uses 'nigger' (once to describe a dark-haired child, or maybe when two Maynards get stuck into the blacking paste? and another time in reference to needing to work hard, from what I remember) unpleasant though that is to read from a modern, culturally-sensitive point of view. Racial context aside, what struck me first was what a weird way for Dick to describe his sickly, very pale, Caucasian twelve-year-old sister, who couldn't possibly look any less like a black child - it just doesn't make a lot of sense as a brotherly nickname! That made me wonder whether EBD in fact knew what the word meant...? It's in a letter in which she works very hard to give an impression of Dick's immersion in Indian life (the bungalow, the heat, the cobras etc), so she may have been trying to show Dick breezily using his 'well-travelled' vocabulary. The other thing I wondered was - is Dick somewhat racist, and does EBD intend us to think that? I hadn't noticed before that when he meets Madge, Joey and Grizel off the train at Innsbruck, he quite harshly disperses a crowd of children begging for money and compares them to Egyptians, as if that's a bad thing: Quote: ‘Awful little beggars!’ he said as they dispersed. ‘They’re nearly as bad as the natives at Port Said. I know we're partly supposed to see this as evidence of Dick being an 'experienced traveller' and a masterful man, but it strikes a very different note to the very involved and concerned engagement with local poverty shown by Madge and the CS later in the book... Or does EBD implicitly approve of Dick's response here, because clamouring street children actively begging for money are somehow less deserving or attractive than the uncomplaining/undemanding (and so more 'deserving' ) peasant poverty of the Tiernsee?

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 9:03 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I don't for a minute think that EBD intended to suggest that Dick was being racist. Expressions like "working like a n-word", which is used to describe someone (Cyrilla Maurus?) when she overdoes her music practice before breakfast, whilst obviously highly offensive now, were not considered particularly offensive at the time. I think your theory that she was trying to make Dick sound well-travelled is probably right: she probably just took it as meaning "child". It's an uncomfortable feeling when you're surrounded by people begging for money, however sympathetic you may be to the poverty in the area concerned. Again, I think EBD was trying to show that Dick was an experienced traveller, and also Madge and the girls were at the end of a long tiring journey and must just've wanted to get out of the station and on to their hotel ASAP. It's been suggested that EBD may have been more sympathetic to "peasant" poverty than to urban poverty, but I think it was partly an issue with begging and largely just that feeling of discomfort when you're accosted by a crowd of people. "Awful little beggars" is rather harsh, though. I think the scene's there largely to show how strange everything seems to Grizel, and what experienced travellers the Bettanys are.

Author:	JB [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 9:08 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I wouldn't say that EBD wanted us to see Dick as racist. I don't think that would have crossed her mind. A lot of GO fiction has similar references that would be unacceptable today but which weren't intended as offensive or negative when they were written. I can't quote any specifics but when GGB republished some of DFB's books a few years ago, I think they were asked to remove some remarks/descriptions which would now be seen as racist. IIRC there are also some other GGB reprints where Ann and Clarissa have explained in the introduction why they've left in certain comments. In relation to a description of Joey in particular, perhaps he meant it as "small child"? Or, as you say, perhaps EBD wasn't aware of the meaning of the word?

Author:	ChubbyMonkey [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:13 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Or perhaps it was one of those ironic names where everybody knows that the person in question is the complete opposite of the name they've been given and that's why they were given it? Or she just didn't know what she was saying! I don't think that Dick was intended to be racist, especially given EBD's very forward thinking on things like the Nazi/German difference, that was just the attitude and language of the time. We've been doing colonial lit. at the moment, and yesterday were discussing 'Heart of Darkness'. There was quite a discussion on whether Conrad was racist, the conclusion of which I believe was that yes, in our time he is, but that for his own period he wouldn't have been at all. And I'm about to branch off into a critique of various theories, so I'll be quiet now

Author:	Sunglass [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:17 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I agree that the whole arrival in Innsbruck is designed to show what experienced travellers Dick, Madge and Joey are - there's also that little bit where Joey and Madge knowledgeably discuss local hotels. And of course Dick is both showing his fluent German and demonstrating that he's able to dispatch a group of begging foreign children without alarm - it's much along the lines of later experienced CS travellers not being surprised at finding baths and cherry jam for breakfast at foreign railway stations etc. But I think I notice both his shouting at the Innsbruck children, and the fact that he seems to mentally class them as like Egyptian street children (as a nuisance and racially other), because it seems like a British 'us' vs a negative foreign 'them' moment which is very rare in EBD. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to be surrounded by a mass of people begging, but isn't it interesting that EBD chooses to show us that here, for once, at the start of the Tyrol period? It's about the only time she ever presents Tyroleans, even very poor ones, in anything other than a completely idealised light. Normally we get picturesque peasant childlike belief, wedding customs, dogs pulling milk carts, dignified cattle herders, faithful retainers etc. But her main characters getting off a train to be surrounded by local children begging vociferously for money gives a much harsher view of the local poverty, I think.

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Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist? http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7430

Author:	Alison H [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 10:38 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
It is quite weird. I assume she must have had a similar experience when she arrived in Tyrol herself. The Austrian economy collapsed after the First World War, partly because of the war itself and partly because, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered, Hungary got the best agricultural land and Czechoslovakia the main industrial areas, and Tyrol was one of the poorer parts of Austria anyway, so it's not difficult to understand how the situation would have arisen. However, it would have been far more in keeping with the books to concentrate on Grizel being awestruck by the wonderful Alpine views, the lovely clean air, a smell of coffee and cakes issuing forth from a station café ... that sort of thing.

Author:	shesings [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 12:30 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I don't think EBD was racist or meant us to think that Dick was. In her day, in spite of large scale poverty beyond anything we have today, street begging was virtually unknown in the UK. It was seen as a shameful and unBritish thing to do and Grizel, at least, would not have come across it before. These days we have become accustomed to seeing beggars huddled in doorways and hanging round underpasses but in my post WW2 youth in a fairly poor city, though we had buskers and travellers who came round the doors with clothes pegs, baskets and so on, we did not have people just asking for money. It was a very effective shorthand way of illustrating just how poor Austria and Tyrol particularly were. She does a similar thing in "Jo Of" after the rescue of Rufus when one of the servants replies to Madge's "Are they very poor?" with a dry "They can live, Madame" It was quite common, too, to hear piccanniny used as an affectionate term for any child. My father, who was involved in the campaign to have Paul Robeson's passport restored to him, used to sing us one of his songs which had the line "time for little piccaninnies to go to sleep" and my only problem with the song was that I always wanted to be, and wasn't, curly headed! During WW2 my grandmother's very small flat was a home from home for allied troops from everywhere - Polish, Russian, French, West Indian, Dutch, American, Norwegian, Danish, Indian, African, English, Irish, Welsh, and even some Scots. She was particularly fond of the black troops, they were always her lovely nigger laddies, and until her death in 1962 she would get Christmas cards, exotic food parcels (sugar cane already!) and proud family photographs sent from them to their beloved Granny J. Neither they or she had any problem about using the n-word - but that was then and this is now.

Author:	abbeybufo [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 12:38 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I seem to remember that 'piccanninny' or 'pickney' was used quite naturally in the early 1950s as a term for any baby or small child, with no racial over/undertones or pejorative intentions at all.

Author:	Jane [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 1:48 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
and even well into the sixties. My mother, who was definitely not at all racist, used to call us piccaninny interchangeably with things like sweetheart, and I had no idea of the connotations. I seem to remember associating it in some way with piccalilli!

Author:	julieanne1811 [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 3:43 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Sunglass wrote: I was skimming Dick's letter about Captain Carrick in Chalet and was struck by his use of a now-offensive racial term to deignate Joey! Quote: ‘I’m awfully glad to hear that the piccaninny is going strong and getting fat.' This is the Wikipedia definition of the term: Quote: Pickaninny (also picaninny or piccaninny) is a potentially offensive derogatory term in English which refers to children of black descent or a racial caricature thereof. It is a pidgin word form, which may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino (an affectionate term derived from pequeno, "little"), though may instead be derived from the Zulu word "pikinini" meaning "small child." The term has also been used in the past to describe aboriginal Australians, although it is now rarely used and is not viewed as offensive as in other countries. Sunglass, I don't entirely agree with your possible assessment of the term. Your quote from Wiki says: Quote: (also picaninny or piccaninny) is a potentially offensive derogatory term , not that it is a 'now-offensive racial term' (unless it is somewhere in the country?). I have never heard it used in offence but have heard it used (even today) as anaffectionateterm. I do agree with you, however, regarding Dick's comments about the begging children, inasfar as the term he uses shows an apparent annoyance with the situation. I spent just over a year working in India, and often it seemed that there was an expectation of certain roles to be played. The children (or women) beg, in a very specific way (facial expression, gestures used) and the recipient then reacts in a given way (either ignoring or giving money). Iyt's as if there's some kind of 'secret code' that both players need to follow. And since it is simply not possible to give everyone what they ask for all the time, it's up to the beggee(rather than the beggar) to decide how to react. At the end of a long train journey, where on has been on the receiving end of a constant stream of people asking for money at every station one can find oneself rather frazzled, and responding in a way that makes you feel ashamed of afterwards. However, this would not have been the case with Dick - he had had no long journey and wasn't (as far as I know) tired. So I guess his response was more a reflection of the way he would react to children asking for money in Eqypt. A more worrying response than the picaninny useage.

Author:	Sunglass [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 4:07 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I've never before heard the term used affectionately for 'child' without any racial inference - that's interesting, and news to me. (And Jane, it's adorable you thought it was akin to piccalilli - a word I'm fairly sure I mis-spelled...) However, I'm very far from being alone in finding the term offensive - Boris Johnson (now mayor of London) famously apologised for using it, after complaints from people, including the ex-chair of the Commission for Racial Equality - this from The Guardian, January 2008: Quote: Boris Johnson has apologised for referring to black people as "piccaninnies" and talking about "watermelon smiles". During a debate for the London mayoral contest on Monday, the Conservative candidate said he was "sad" that people had been offended but insisted the words had been taken out of context. In a column published in the Daily Telegraph six years ago, Johnson mocked Tony Blair's globetrotting: "What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies," he wrote. It also mentioned "watermelon smiles". At the debate, sponsored by the Evening Standard, Michael Eboda, former editor of New Nation, said that some of Johnson's writings had been offensive. "These things are an extremely big obstacle to being able to work with what is 12% of London's population," he said. Johnson responded: "I feel sad that people have been offended by those words and I apologise for them." Lord Ouseley - the former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, who recently wrote to the Tory leader, David Cameron, expressing concern about Johnson, said: "I personally recognise that you have to move on, but there are other people who he will have to convince."

Author:	Chelsea [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 4:31 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
For reasons I don't know, I always assumed that the word meant "scatterbrained" and was actually meant to be affectionate. Not that it is a word I hear often, but I never knew it had racial undertones of any sort. Interesting.

Author:	julieanne1811 [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 4:51 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Sunglass wrote: I've never before heard the term used affectionately for 'child' without any racial inference - that's interesting, and news to me. I wonder, then, if it depends on the recipient of the term? If it's used towards a child it certainly has affectionate overtones, but other people obviously find it personally offensive...

Author:	shesings [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 5:47 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Today I find the n-word totally unacceptable and would probably regard piccanninny in the same way but at the time when EBD was writing we cannot just assume that either she or Dick was a racist, One of her most profound remarks comes in 'Exile' when Vater Bar decides he will leave with the school. He says "I love my country, but I will not stay to see her disgraced by secret imprisonments, maltreating of Jews,- though I have no real love of Jews, they have the right to live and prosper with any of us - and concentration camps". That is an excellent statement of respect for the human right of others whether we are well disposed to them or not. The parenthesis was cut in the PB, possibly for lack of space, but also possibly because when it was first published in 1967 there was still a very strong post-Holocaust sensitivity to any remark which could be seen as anti-Semitic. Mind you, on the subject of beggars, Joey's throwaway remark to Gottfried that the Nazi regime was a case of "putting beggars on horseback" neatly shows the British attitude to begging at that time.

Author:	Clare [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:15 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I'm pretty sure my dad used to sing a song with the phrase pickaninny in it beofre we went to bed... I can't remember the words, but I know that was in it and I always took it as an affectionate term, never knew about the racial background. Learn something new everyday.

Author:	Tor [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:18 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
my Grandma used that term affectionately all the time too. I assumed it was an irish word (My Grandma was Irish). I am now wondering what the etymology of 'ninny' (as in 'you ninny', used to mean foolish). I assumed it came from a corruption of innocent, but I am now worried it has some horrible racist origin. goes off to check dictionary

Author:	cestina [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:33 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I can well see why Boris Johnson had to apologise for his use of the term piccanninny, especially if he coupled it with watermelon smiles. As shesings says "that was then, and this is now". In my childhood it had no racial overtones at all, it was used very much as I use "poppet" when talking to and of my granddaughter. In the same way as the golliwog has become unacceptable as a toy, or as the symbol of a particular make of jam, so the word has become objectionable to today's ears. I have a horrible suspicion that if we were to listen to quite a lot of the incomparable Paul Robeson's songs we would flinch at some of the terminology. I really don't think, though that one can interpret writings of past times, however unpleasantly they sound to us today in the same way as we would criticise something written today in our rather more politically correct world.....

Author:	andi [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:35 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
When I was a child in (then) Rhodesia in the '70s, 'piccanin' was fairly commonly used as a slang description of a small child - rather like the word 'kid', but generally of black children rather than white. From memory (I was pretty young at the time) it was used by all races and not particularly derogatory, but then, I was young and I might have missed the undertones.

Author:	Nightwing [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 9:01 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
On the subject of EBD's open attitudes - she certainly saw all Europeans as being equal, but it's hard to say whether or not she would have seen non-whites as equal, too. I mean, the CS is a very Euro-centric series - understandably so! - but the only CoC we get in the whole book is Lilimani, and I don't think it's ever even explicitly said that she isn't white (although it would be hard to assume that she isn't, given her name and background). Unfortunately, most of what we do hear about India not only has elements of racism, but classism too. We get Dick's comments about beggars, and I'm sure there are more than a few throwaway lines about "the natives", too, but we never hear anyone's thoughts on the upper echelons of society. I suspect, though, that only fairly Westernised - or Britishised - PoC would have had a chance to really have been seen as equal. Then again, Joey mentions that she learned the local language while she was in India - surely she wouldn't have bothered if she had no respect for the people who spoke it? Slightly OT, but the descriptions of the various "Peoples of the World" stalls in Carola are all kinds of awful. The Maori stall in particular squicks me every time.

Author:	MJKB [ Wed Mar 03, 2010 11:04 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Nightwing wrote: and I'm sure there are more than a few throwaway lines about "the natives", too Isn't there an authorial criticism of the Carrick's arrogance towards their 'native'brethren? Can't remember the actual quote but she says something about them being the type of Anglo Indians who look down their noses at the Indians. Re the horrible n word, we have quite a lot of difficulty with its use by some of our African children. We had to stop them from talking about the 'n walk'. It made us very uncomfortble, and unsure what steps to take.

Author:	linda [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 12:20 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
abbeybufo wrote: I seem to remember that 'piccanninny' or 'pickney' was used quite naturally in the early 1950s as a term for any baby or small child, with no racial over/undertones or pejorative intentions at all. I quite agree. This term was used frequently when I was very small in the late 1940s/early 1950s, and certainly not with any racial overtones. It just meant a small child or baby. I can remember my Gran calling my new baby brother ' her beautiful little piccanninny' when she was nursing him. I do worry that some people take exception to language used in books written many years ago without realising that this language was perfectly acceptable and commonplace in the era when the book was written. It seems to me that the pressure from the PC brigade is having a very detrimental effect on the English language. I get really angry with the way that words are hijacked by various groups and meanings changed to suit their purpose without any consideration being given to the original derivation and meaning of the words.

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 12:31 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
She says that someone considers the English the only people worth considering, but I can't remember if it was the Carricks themselves or Juliet's previous headmistress. Will have a quick look ... Ah, here it is - Quote: Juliet had grown up in the class of Anglo-Indian society that considers the English the only nation worth mentioning, and her training in a Hill school, where nine-tenths of the girls were Eurasians who looked down on their native cousins with a bitter contempt, had helped to foster this feeling. Unfortunately, that sort of attitude would, as EBD says, not have been that uncommon at the time. I'm not quite sure what the difference between the Carricks' "class of Anglo-Indian society" and that of the Bettanys was, but I'd say we were meant to assume that the Bettanys do not feel like that in any way whatsoever. It's made quite clear that the Carricks' attitude is not one that either EBD or the Bettanys approve of. Slightly OT, but EBD seems to've had an issue with Prussians, or at least Junker class Prussians. Thekla's issues are blamed on her "Prussian" upbringing, whereas no-one else's issues are blamed on their nationality (except more minor things like Simone's soppiness). & Madge, after hearing about the row with Frau Berlin, says something about Prussians being filled with hatred. Personally I think that Frau Berlin's rudeness probably had far more to do with hearing someone describe her as a scarlet hippopotamus and say they'd commit suicide if they were as fat as she was than it had to do with bitterness about the Great War, but anyway! Obviously I understand that that would not have been an unusual view in the context of the mid-1920s, but it doesn't really fit with the cosmopolitan nature of the books in general. Sorry for getting totally off the point . Joey tells one of the many girls who apparently hadn't realised that they'd have to speak French and German at the CS that she found it very strange when she went to India and heard "Hindustani" being spoken all around her, and, as Nightwing said, she learned the language, and that indicates a respect for different people and cultures; and we're also told that Lavender and Lilamani soon became close friends in Kashmir. Some of the words EBD uses aren't acceptable now, but I'm sure she never saw her "good" characters as racist. Sorry for waffling ... should really go to bed ...

Author:	Miss Di [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 4:22 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I've never thought of piccanninni being an offensive term, just a word for a small child - but as the wiki article said it's perhaps less offensive in Australia!

Author:	shesings [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 9:17 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I think it is a question of context. Certainly, EBD's writings are remarkably open and cosmopolitan in comparison with many of the writers of her time. The pre-war works of Agatha Christie, for example, are casually anti-Semitic, not to mention patronising and ill-informed about the working class, and don't get me started on Bulldog Drummond etc! I agree with Linda about perfectly good and descriptive words being hi-jacked. When I was a child a packieman was the person who either knocked on the door with a catalogue or suitcase full of enticing objects to sell you or the person who came round every week to collect the instalments on the goods you had purchased at the door! The name had been in use decades, if not centuries, before the creation of the state of Pakistan but that didn't stop a local authority worker being disciplined for using it in the presence of a Pakistani fellow worker. This was despite the protest of his Pakistani co-worker who pointed out, vigorously, that she had, since her infancy, also known and used the word in the sense her mate was using it and she didn't know why there was a problem. It was overheard by a 'superior' and that was enough!

Author:	Sunglass [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 9:32 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Nightwing wrote: Unfortunately, most of what we do hear about India not only has elements of racism, but classism too. We get Dick's comments about beggars, and I'm sure there are more than a few throwaway lines about "the natives", too, but we never hear anyone's thoughts on the upper echelons of society. I suspect, though, that only fairly Westernised - or Britishised - PoC would have had a chance to really have been seen as equal. Joey's learning of the local language could certainly indicate respect for/interest in its speakers - depressingly, I certainly come across the opposite attitude here in the ME (don't speak Arabic or they'll think they've got you where they want you ) - although she is depicted as just picking up languages piecemeal anyway. Doesn't she save the day on the flight from Austria by speaking some Romany to the pursuers? I'm always interested that Dick's Forestry job seems pretty hands-on - in the letter to Madge where he tells her to avoid the Carricks, he talks about doing outdoor, manual work planting fruit trees, which surprises me a little, now that I think of it. I vaguely expected he would be some kind of higher-up administrator type who wouldn't be getting his own hands dirty, just issuing orders. Mind you, he must have been fairly junior in the service still in Chalet - if we assume he went to university, and he's 24, he's probably on his first furlough home from India at the start of the book, so can't have been there more than 3 years...? On the India, class and race issue, this passage also interests me, because I'm not sure precisely what EBD is intending us to understand: Quote: Juliet had grown up in the class of Anglo-Indian society that considers the English the only nation worth mentioning, and her training in a Hill school, where nine-tenths of the girls were Eurasians who looked down on their native cousins with a bitter contempt, had helped to foster this feeling. She had sneered at ‘foreigner Prefects,’ asserting that they could not possibly act adequately. 'Anglo-Indian' and 'Eurasian' are usually used to designate mixed-race people of mixed Indian and British/European descent, but EBD calls the Carricks Anglo-Indian, and has Madge asking Dick to get his Anglo Indian friends to send their daughters to the CS, which suggests EBD understood it to refer to British residents in India without any Indian ancestry. But the passage does still work kind of, the other way - people of mixed heritage had a horrible time under the later Raj, and some were understandably desperate to attach themselves to Britishness and were snobbish/racist about Indians, so if Juliet's old school was nine tenths mixed race girls, they might still have thought the English 'the only race worth mentioning'. But the attitude Juliet picks up (hostility to foreigners) is interesting in itself, because it's so totally absent from the CS British girls otherwise in a way EBD clearly expects us to find exceptional and praiseworthy - it's only with the arrival of the Saints that we start to get British characters sneering at foreigners and their uselessness at cricket. I think we had a discussion on here a while ago about whether 'bronzed' Captain Carrick and his 'sallow' wife, not to mention the contrast between Juliet's dark eyes and fair hair was EBD hinting they had some Indian blood...? Nightwing wrote: Slightly OT, but the descriptions of the various "Peoples of the World" stalls in Carola are all kinds of awful. The Maori stall in particular squicks me every time. Oh, I agree. It never seems all that different to the two occasions where CS girls dress up as 'savages' (the bullying of Miss Norman, where Joyce gives herself Afro hair and they grunt and squat on the floor and paint their faces, apparanently in imitation of what they believe to be Australian Aboriginal behaviour ) or the Pocahontas story in Oberammergau, which also involved painting 'Red Indian' marks and tattoos on themselves!

Author:	Alison H [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 10:39 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Puts historian's hat on. I've always assumed that EBD meant British people living in India, rather than people of mixed British and Indian descent - but she's got her words wrong if so! "Anglo-Indian" changed its meaning early in the 20th century. Originally, "Anglo-Indian" meant a British person who lived in India, usually someone born in India but who had British parents. It then came to mean a person of mixed British and Indian descent - that would have been its meaning by the time School At was written, though, so EBD's using it out of context. "Eurasian" was used in the 19th century to mean a person of mixed British/European and Indian descent: it was largely replaced by "Anglo-Indian" once "Anglo-Indian" had changed its meaning. Hope that makes some sort of sense. Sadly, attitudes changed a lot: mixed-race relationships were originally looked on favourably, as was Indian culture in general (especially regarding bathing and personal cleanliness, which I'm afraid people in 17th/early 18th century Britain weren't too good on!), but things changed. I wonder who the other one-tenth of girls at Juliet's school were: it can't have been very pleasant for them if they were looked down on by 90% of their classmates .

Author:	Loryat [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 3:00 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Quote: Juliet had grown up in the class of Anglo-Indian society that considers the English the only nation worth mentioning, and her training in a Hill school, where nine-tenths of the girls were Eurasians who looked down on their native cousins with a bitter contempt, had helped to foster this feeling. I think EBD is using Anglo-Indian to mean 'British people living in India' and Eurasian to mean 'girls who have mixed-race backgrounds'. But since she often uses this type of word wrongly maybe I'm wrong? My reading is that Juliet's parents being poor have sent her to a school where most of the girls are from a mixed-race background, therefore are presumably unable to attend a school for white children. In general these people would not be well off either as it was very difficult (impossible really) for someone who wasn't white to get anywhere in colonial India. So the one tenth I would imagine would be white girls from backgrounds similar to Juliet's. I don't think Indian girls from families with the money for school would have been sent to that sort of school but this is just a guess. Either way, the school must have been a horrible place to be! I have always read Dick's use of the word 'picaninny' as an affectionate term meaning 'little one', and certainly not racist in any way. However I myself would never use the word as for me it definitely has uncomfortable overtones. Wasn't 'picaninny' a word used to describe child slaves/the children of slaves in America? I think for her time EBD was very forward thinking, accepting of other nationalities and tried to be non-snobbish. However like most writers of her time you do get a definite impression of a patronising attitude to working class people and non-whites. But we should only judge the sentiment and not EBD. She was a product of her time, more tolerant than most, and for all we know we might have been worse. shesings wrote: I think it is a question of context. Certainly, EBD's writings are remarkably open and cosmopolitan in comparison with many of the writers of her time. The pre-war works of Agatha Christie, for example, are casually anti-Semitic, not to mention patronising and ill-informed about the working class, and don't get me started on Bulldog Drummond etc! In one AC book two characters bond over the face that they both 'dislike negroes' . Admittedly I think one of them turns out to be the murderer but still! And Georgette Heyer has some definite anti-Semitism after WWII . It is only when we read things like this in books that we realise how bad people's attitudes once were. I'd take todays slightly sanitised overly sensitive PC attitudes over that any day (which is not to say I approve of everything the PC brigade get up to either).

Author:	ChubbyMonkey [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 5:42 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
We've spent the last couple of weeks studying colonial literature, so I just have to butt in and add my two penny worth, sorry! We've been studying mainly 'Beyond the Pale' by Kipling and 'Heart of Darkness' by Conrad, and I have to say that put next to EBD she looks very forward thinking indeed! BtP opens with the phrase "White should stick with White and Black with Black" (quoted roughly from memory) and even HoD, which is supposed to be anti-empire, still holds what we would now consider to be horribly racist views. I think that the fact that these stick out so badly in the series shows how non-racist EBD otherwise was. And as other people have said, she's being influenced by the time she was writing as much as anything; and with words like Anglo-Indian, she has to get them wrong, or what would we talk about on here?

Author:	JB [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 6:59 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
ChubbyMonkey wrote: and with words like Anglo-Indian, she has to get them wrong, or what would we talk about on here? I don't think she did get it wrong. I think Alison and Loryat are right in that she's using the term correctly for the time as a description of British people in India. It's not uncommon in fiction of that era. Loryat, that's just how i assumed Juliet's school to have been. In some ways it reminds me of Beth Chester's school in Guernsey, where she mixed with the "wrong sort" of girls. While the Chesters couldn't pay for a better school, perhaps the Carricks wouldn't ....

Author:	Laura V [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 9:47 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I'm reading the Wordsworth edition of UNcle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe at the moment and the introduction has information about racial stereotypes and how Stowe's positive representation of slave characters actually backfired and became almost racist slurs as a result. The word 'picaninny' is mentioned as one such example.

Author:	shesings [ Thu Mar 04, 2010 10:20 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
Yes, 'Uncle Tom' was a good example of that, Laura. What Stowe portrayed as a decent man of high integrity and courage became a byword in the Civil Rights Movement for someone too afraid to challenge the racial status quo.

Author:	Miss Di [ Fri Mar 05, 2010 2:10 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
I've just been reading Kipling Sahib by Charles Allen and it makes the same point as Alison on the use/meaning of Anglo-Indian and Eurasian.

Author:	Loryat [ Fri Mar 05, 2010 1:16 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
shesings wrote: Yes, 'Uncle Tom' was a good example of that, Laura. What Stowe portrayed as a decent man of high integrity and courage became a byword in the Civil Rights Movement for someone too afraid to challenge the racial status quo. While I can understand that people would be infuriated by Uncle Tom's passive acceptance of his fate, it always seemed to me that Tom was supposed to be a Christ-like figure and that therefore the extremely religious Stowe was paying him a compliment! Just as Jesus chose to suffer, so does Tom, and the point is that both suffer because of unjust persecution. There are plenty of more rebellious characters in the novel and I think it's just difficult for the twentieth and twenty first century reader to understand Stowe's very Victorian sentimental depiction of passive suffering, which in those days was deemed far more laudable than it is now.

Author:	Rob [ Mon Mar 08, 2010 4:28 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Bizarre racial expression used of Joey, or is Dick racist?
For the record, I do not, in any way think that EBD was intentionally racist (or not any more so than the average Briton at the time she was writing, anyway) and find it quite sad that the PC brigade pick up on words (such as piccaninny) and quote the etymology to prove that it is a racist term when, even if some uses of the word may be intentionally racist, it is not used exclusively in this way and the way it is used, may have developed in some cultures (as I would hazard it was in this example) into a synonym for something else. Please note this is in no way meant as an attack on Sunglass, the way in which she has started this thread or any subsequent posters who have agreed with her points, just a rant on the fact that the way in which a word has been used for years can seemingly be ignored in the face of being PC. Having said that, this is only sort-of-maybe-if-you-squint OT but, I came across Tom Gay saying the following in Bride Leads: [Bride has decided to write to Jo about the prefect’s problem with Diana; EBD’s emphasis] EBD wrote: “Well done, you! That’s the best notion yet! Mrs Maynard ought to be able to advise us if anyone can. She’s been a Head Girl herself – and when the school was half full of foreigners! I’ll bet she had some rum knots to cut; and then she’s always kept up with the school.” Is Tom being racist here? If so, this certainly doesn’t seem to fit in with the forward thinking way the rest of the series is written. Yet the suggestion certainly seems to be that Jo's experiences in dealing with troublemakers, would have been somehow heightened or enhanced due to her experience with ‘foreigners’. Doesn’t she (Tom) know that the continental girls were almost exclusively charming and polite? Can anyone provide me with any other interpretations which fit better with the tone of the rest of the books?