Ontario.- There burning of nearly 5,000 pounds in Canadian schools, including comics Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Lukesince they spread stereotypes about indigenous peoplereignited the debate over whether these old comics were falling into racism and should now be banned or changed.

Radio Canada revealed this action of “purification by flames”, which occurred in 2019 and adopted by the School Board of thirty French-speaking Catholic schools in Ontario, as a “gesture of reconciliation with the First Nations.”

Canada is immersed in a process of confronting its racist past and the cultural genocide it perpetrated against its first inhabitants, and this includes the recent discovery of the remains of hundreds of indigenous Canadian children in a former school residence where the aborigines were forcibly interned for almost 80 years.

This is not the first time these stories have been the subject of accusations of racism. The Asterix comics, for example, underwent changes in the representation of black characters (reduction in the color and size of their enormous red lips) during their reissue in the United States in 2020, according to the publisher Papercutz.

For its part, “Tintin in the Congo” was taken to court in Belgium by a Congolese citizen who unsuccessfully demanded restrictions on the distribution of the work.

The lawsuit was dismissed due to a judgment that ruled out that the content of the work could be considered “racist” in the context of the time. “The comic strip was not racist in 1931 (when it was first published), although it may be in light of today's mentality,” explained the publisher's lawyer.

The court also did not agree to include, as the plaintiff claimed, a warning text on the content, which happens with this specific comic in the United Kingdom by judicial decision.

Entertainment companies combat racism by warning viewers

Adding an explanatory message about the historical context is one of the solutions found when reading or viewing works that shock the current mentality by reflecting the stereotypes of the era in which they were created.

This is the case of the platform HBO, which added in the introduction to “Gone with the Wind” (1939) the explanation of the university doctor and cinema specialist Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago). According to him, “this epic drama from 1939 must be seen in its original form, contextualized and debated”.

Likewise, other companies such as disney include the label “this program is presented as originally created, may contain outdated cultural depictions” in old classics that contain winks and details that, to 21st century eyes, would be considered racist and outdated .

The case of “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) is paradigmatic. DW Griffith, a masterpiece of cinematic prowess whose screening was canceled several times in the United States for having glorified the white xenophobic organization Ku Klux Klan and showing blacks as the villains or imbeciles of the film.

But you don't have to go back decades to find examples of racism in cultural works, and in recent times this has generated controversy, for example the use of terms like “ni**er” ( black) by American rappers, unrelated to this. this word, because of its racist past, still hurts many African Americans.

Another controversial example can be found in the rock band Guns N'Roses, who omitted from the 2018 re-release of “Appetite for Destruction” (1987) the song “One in a Million”, in which singer Axl Rose sings. attacked both “police officers and blacks”. ”, against “immigrants and queers” who went to their country to “spread a fucking disease”. EFE