@anartist The story itself can be magical & fun and something that sparks the imagination of the child who reads or hears or sees it. What makes a story racist is not much different than what makes one stereotype worse than another.
Those stories become racist because they perpetuate particular stereotypes &/or expectations in regard to those they are about. Those stereotypes perpetuated lead to perceptions among various people who don’t know any better either because they’re too stupid to, or because they’re too ignorant & privileged to bother doing the research to find out different. Much like the media perpetuates concepts about one group or another outside of the country which allows people to perpetuate their views and stereotypes of those cultures or nations in order to allow us to all feel good about bombing the shit out of those places in order to increase our own power over others in one way shape or form…. the stories of our childhood do much the same with groups that are already marginalized – the only difference is that they do that within our own borders as opposed to outside them.
When stories are told & stereotypes perpetuated and the full story or picture isn’t revealed or explored, it creates various biases among those who are exposed to those stories and stories like them.
If those people don’t ever receive the full information about those marginalized groups &/or cultures then they one day grow up to become senators who sit in meetings that are about poverty – when there is a discussion about poverty and how that affects access to healthy food those senators think it normal and sensible to make jokes about BBQ and how good the food that they perceive as being stereotypically black is, rather than making statements that are informed by more than their taste buds and their ignorance.
It is these ignorant people who as children hear stories that perpetuate stereotypes and never have them corrected who become our leaders and make the decisions that make or break entire cultures of people to put them in positions of having opportunities which are in fact NOT equal as our constitution guarantees. Then in turn when people complain that they aren’t on equal footing those same stereotypes which were never corrected, then perpetuate the concepts held by those in privilege, that those people are simply not working hard enough and that they are cry baby welfare moochers with nothing but complaints about how life isn’t fair & no willingness to work hard.
Stories seem simple enough…. who wouldn’t as a child wish to be able to run around a tree or a stone to trick a tiger into churning itself into some yummy butter for our toast? Who doesn’t as a child feel comforted by the slow sweet seemingly safe old man whistling about how the world is a beautiful place? It’s the further meanings of those stories & the perpetuation of those stereotypes that go along with them, which move from comforting stories of our childhoods to clear but completely false perceptions of people in our adult years who become decision makers in our society.