Talk:Tar Baby/@comment-26536288-20160227214900/@comment-32522131-20170709034454

Yes, red lips would make it worse. It would clash with the yellow coat.

The original Brer Rabbit stories by Joel Chandler Harris didn't even have the Tar Baby story. Though the stories in the book do have written accents for the characters, unfortunately it just points up the racial bias in Song of the South. And Tar Baby was a slur for a black man.

People will recognize the story if you only change the costume of the character. You will also lose meaning when you change the character because the whole point of the Tar Baby was for it to be black. And even if it wasn't, tar is black. And honey isn't nearly as sticky as tar and won't keep you from moving.

The stories belong in a museum like the story of Little Black Sambo. They deserve to be preserved, but as a cautionary tale. You can't whitewash (so to speak) American slavery like Germany tried to whitewash World War II. "Cleaning up" history only sweeps these mistakes under the rug, leaving us open to repeating our mistakes.

What can be done is to retell these stories in a different context: not two white children coming to live on a plantation, but have a different setting in a different era and include diverse characters at equal footing in the story. The whole point of Song of the South was to retell the Brer Rabbit stories. The Brer Rabbit stories can easily be rewritten to accommodate the different setting without losing the sense of the stories.

And that newly-written story can be released to the public.