More Censorship: This Time Global

Thanks to The Beat for drawing my attention to this story about a Belgian trying to censor Herge's Tin Tin in the Congo by having it banned in Belgium due to its racist imagery.

While I can't defend how Africans and blacks have been portrayed in comics at times, these comics are very important artifacts, and it seems to me that removing them from view is more about controlling people's collective sense of themselves rather than giving them the opportunity to face historical facts, their faces and the faces of their artists.

"It makes people think black people have not evolved," said the Belgium.

Wrong. It reveals that you think readers are too stupid to realize the text is situated in a specific time and takes on a specific assumption set that, as appalling as it may be to many of us now, was prevalent for a few hundred years.

Another complaint is about an African woman bowing to a white man and saying, "White man great! White mister is big juju man!"

Here's a comment that will make me unpopular: White man is great. White man has had and still has big juju.

Black man is great too. So is brown man and yellow man and whatever. Each has had their imperialistic moments. Each has contributed great goods and great evils to society throughout history (to channel my inner Johnny Cochran, my point is that "Good and Great do not always Equate!"). Even if one confronts versions of power and realities in texts that one has the right not to read if one so chooses, censoring evidence of these facts is just plain stupid, like what Herge's characters and contemporaries might have thought about the intelligences of Africans-level stupid.