Complaint stirs racist-book storm
A FATHER of two mixed-race boys was outraged when he was told by a bookseller that it was okay to continue selling a racist Tintin book to children.
David Enright, aged 40, of Blake Close, St Albans, was amazed to find the cartoon book, Tintin in the Congo, which depicts black African people as intellectually and socially inferior to white people, in the children’s section of Borders book shop in London Colney.
He complained to the shop manager who passed the complaint on to Borders head office. He also made a complaint to Herts police who logged the sale of the book as a racist incident.
The head of risk management at Borders later wrote to Mr Enright, a human rights lawyer in London, saying that they would continue to sell the book which has a warning sticker about its offensive contents on its wrapper.
But it had been removed from the children’s section of Borders shops and would now be for sale in the adult graphic section only.Several other booksellers have taken the same steps and the complaint has snowballed into intense debate in the media about whether or not the book should be sold. As a result, sales have risen 4,000 per cent.
The book at the centre of the storm was written in 1931 by the Belgian cartoonist Herge when the Congo was still ruled by Belgium. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is now calling for its removal from all shelves because it is so offensive to black people.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1114
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1117
Says a reader: Firstly, this guy’s baby mama comes from Ghana, far from the scene of Tintin’s “crime” of reportage, the Congo. Secondly, no sub-Saharan black group has ever had independent means of an alphabet, numerical calculation, basic husbandry (except, perhaps, the guinea hen, in, ironically, Ms. Enright’s environs in West Africa, where they may also have had smelting), etc., and these facts were much more obvious when Tintin was created. Similarly, are we to censor Chaucer’s depictions of barbaric Medieval Europeans because someone happens to be married to a modern-day white woman? People would laugh at the suggestion, and rightfully so, as well they should about this absurd “complaint,” which is probably all about self-indulgence and hoped for payoffs.