1926年4月15日——《野蛮人中的普通人》

Perfectly normal.

Ya but he actually knows how things work, iirc he even gets them generating and distributing electricity

Love the detail about their home planet getting wiped out by a plague from a disease passed on by telephones, after deporting all the telephone sanitizers

I found this vintage children's book once called something like "how children around the world get to school." It talked about Americans taking a bus, Dutch children walking in wooden shoes, Arab children riding on camels, etc. The illustrations were not flattering at all for anyone dark skinned and the explanations of how the children got to school was usually wrong (I don't remember each mode of transport. Those three are the ones I remember.) But the end of the book was about how every child around the world is just like you. They play, they do chores, they eat breakfast, and they get to school somehow. Basically how each one is a child of God and the reader needs to remember that when meeting children who look and talk differently than them. What a beautifully progressive message but very questionable execution.

I find things like that fascinating and I think it’s a way of writing about history that’s missed a lot. There’s a ton of period pieces being made where the writers (understandably) don’t simply want to show everyone historically being very racist/sexist/etc, but instead they just substitute modern talking points directly into the mouths of characters from 100+ years ago which also feels very wrong. People certainly would have had progressive beliefs, but they wouldn’t have ever thought to express them in our words or the way we think. I have an 1800’s ladies magazine at home with an article pro-womens’ suffrage, except it doesn’t argue (like we would) that men and women are the same and obviously deserving of the same rights, but that women have a more caring and philanthropic nature that makes them just as good, if not better, at solving social issues (such as education, care for the sick, poor, etc) and therefore womens’ voices are needed in politics. Our feminist ideas today just would never occur to feminists 150+ years ago even if we both agree on points like ‘women should vote/go to college/etc’. The same way that this cartoonist is making fun of the ‘average man’ but still uses imagery and language that to us is clearly very racist.

Or it’s a good point on how we can focus on appearances and claim racism while ignoring the important racism trope being attacked by said cartoon Edit: if you ask a lit major, they’d likely say that using the artistic form for Africans of the time was meant to be juxtaposed with the content.

You say that like no other race has thought of themselves as superior. For Japanese in particular, you should look into 'Yamato racial superiority'.

They have been posting. I really enjoy those so much.