Racism in Tin Tin

During the conclusion of our lecture today, Prof. Serrano brought up the issue of racism and its censorship in The Adventures of Tin Tin by Hergé. (Side note: I apologize in advance as I am still not yet familiar with the names of everyone in our class so I will refer to our peers as A) While I agree with A’s point that racism should have no place in comics targeting young children as an audience, I firmly believe that the racist overtones in the salient comic should not be censored. Publishers are committing an act of disservice to the general public, present and past, by making their comics more politically correct to fit with the times. To be clear, I am not advocating for comics to include racist overtones nor that old comics to remain as they stand. My proposition is for comics to include a disclaimer on the cover or immediately after, warning the reader that its content may include depictions that were commonplace during another era and that these depictions are wrong today as it was in the past. In fact, these types of disclaimers already exist today. Publishers or editors would not need to re-invent the wheel on this matter. Amazon and iTunes have already begun showing these disclaimers in their old episodes of Tom and Jerry. iTunes disclaimer is as follows:

These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

I do acknowledge that young children will most likely ignore the disclaimer on the front covers of the comic. However, comics should not be held responsible for teaching young children about racism. Sensitive matters such as racism should be discussed between the child and his/her parent(s). Therefore, these potential disclaimers are not for the benefit of children but for the parents of these children. The disclaimers should be placed so parents will know the type of subject matter their children will be exposed to when reading these comics. After all, parents should always be knowledgeable of the media their children consume. Furthermore, parents can thus take advantage of these comics and begin a dialogue with their children about these troubling issues regarding racism that are still highly prevalent today.