It's a part of history, and scrubbing the original text is artificial and unnecessary.

Haven't we edited casual racism out of American books too? I'm no expert - I thought I once read that the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or something like that was rewritten in parts in order to remove the casual racism that was part and parcel of it?

I think this is a hard question. I don't know what today's kids make out of reading about someone "playing black". If there is any chance that this contributes to racism, I'd tend to swing my opinion in the other direction. These children's stories do construe the "neger" as the ultimate "other".

This is the kind of children's book that our school still had lying around when I first went to school in Europe:

https://www.google.ch/search?q=globi+in+afrika&hl=de&client=firefox-a&tbo=d&rls=org.mozilla:de fficial&gbv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=trIPUbGvAcWItAbx54CADA&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAA&biw=1280&bih=711

(I suppose you get which pictures I mean)

Something tells me it's not ok and that it contributes to racism. Something else tells me "ah, those were very different times".

I simply dunno.

It has the Literati all divided, riled up and at each other's throats. I can't make up my mind about the issue. As a lover of literature, I think even children should come to embrace l'art pour l'art, even though maybe they're too young to understand what that means.
As someone who is troubled by the way that casual, romaticized racist notions have survived in the very heart of Europe, I'm strongly in favor of rewriting all that racist, reactionary shit that we teach our kids with "literature".

I'm quite torn on this.

Would rewriting these books change the latent, cryptic reactionary racism that offends me so much? People like my father, I suppose, insist that "neger" isn't all that bad because it was, after all, a word they learned from a children's book.

Does insisting on l'art pour l'art arguments have any merits when the focus is on children's literature? Can this be an argument if children aren't even capable of appreciating l'art in the sense implied here?

So many questions, so few answers.

Young kids won't care about the history, they just want the story.

In later grades cover those same, popular, stories in class with the original versions.

This way everyone gets something out of the deal.

From a literary standpoint it should probably be kept intact, and parents can explain to older kids the racist history behind the books. The problem is that young kids won't understand that and might just internalize the racism. Maybe for books for kids under 8 to 10 or so, edit it so the story can be enjoyed without the racism, and older kids can have the history explained, and in fact that might be a good lesson for them. "This used to be considered perfectly OK in the US (or wherever.) This is part of our history." For older kids, I worry that sanitizing our history too much makes them blind to it, which can contribute to "color-blind" racism, where we ignore the history and expect public policy to ignore it as well.

This sort of thing is nonsense most of the time, but particularly here, as "Neger" simply means 'negro', and has no negative baggage, other than being a bit (and only a bit) outdated.

God, I hate political correctness. I bet the complainer was a hypersensitive white person who thinks that such whingeing constitutes a blow for racial justice.

I think this social cleansing is an insult. Am I assumed to be so thin-skinned that history must be rewritten to protect me?