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kleinbl00  ·  2097 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: Down with Dr. Seuss or this is craziness?

    I like the stories that Rudyard Kipling produced, but man is some of that stuff seriously dated, racist by today's standards and out of line with modern sensibilities. He writing gives us a way to travel back in time and understand that era.

I agreed with you wholesale until I read Said. Said's entire point is that Kipling gives you a way to travel back in time and repeat the exact same mistakes of that era. More than that, the canon of works in which white writers encounter foreign cultures is not useful in understanding the white writers, it's useful in perpetuating their prejudices and distaste for foreign cultures.