Friday, July 13, 2007

Tin Tin gets up the Nose of Official Britain



We read:

"A cartoon adventure featuring Tintin, the heroic Belgian journalist, should not be sold in Britain, the Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday.

The racism watchdog said that it was unacceptable for any shop to sell or display Tintin in the Congo, a comic book written in 1930 that features crude racial stereotypes.

A spokeswoman said that the book, which includes a scene featuring Tintin being made chief of an African village because he is a "good white man", was highly offensive. "This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the `savage natives' look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles," she said....

Egmont, which publishes the book, said that every edition delivered to shops had a band of paper around the outside making clear the content is offensive. A warning notes that it features "bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period - an interpretation some readers may find offensive".

The current edition, the first in colour to be published in Britain, was released in 2005. It has been published in black and white in Britain for more than ten years. The commission was alerted to the book by David Enright, a solicitor who found it in the children's section of Borders. "I was aghast to see page after page of representations of black African people as baboons or monkeys, bowing before a white teenager and speaking like retarded children," he wrote.

Source