Modern reimagining of The Three Musketeers make Musketeers sound more honorable and noble then actual text. Some comedies make them sound incapable, clumsy and funny. Dumas politics was not pro-ancient regime and he actually makes it clear. Making that into super honorable flawless dudes is as much "changing past fiction" as if you slapped gender or race or made them eskimos. But somehow that is fine.
> If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are just white people with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black people and women complaining about?
In general, they complain about how they are or were treated back in real world. They also complain about being depicted in fiction as dumb simpletons without agency and then people on discussion forums claiming that those dumb simpletons depictions somehow constitute historical reality.
Back in the early 2000s I saw someone refer to a wheelchair-bound person as "handicapable". The disabled fellow ran over his foot lol.
Point being I think it's best not to minimize people's suffering. Acknowledge it, respect it, and try to move forward together.
I don't want others to think of me as disabled either (though a little understanding might be nice when I fail to mask well enough).
Maybe the problem is how we treat the disabled, not the words we use to talk about disability?
In general, it's (IMHO) not needed to have centuries old books full of stereotypes in modern curricula. There are so many works that have been published in the last decades that provide far better diversity of all kinds than even a "de-racisted" historic book can. Modern authors, modern artists, modern composers and other artists deserve their shine in the spotlight as well - it's ridiculous how much of curricula is spent on stuff that happened or got created hundreds to thousands of years ago. We have to refocus education on modern events if we want a modern society.
And if you want something filled with racial or other stereotypes in curricula, ffs print it with commentary like we do with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" here in Germany. That is, coincidentally, the only way one is allowed to do a reprint in Germany due to copyright and anti-Nazi symbolism laws.
How can a word be a bomb?
And I'm still at a loss how in a supposedly post-enlightenment world, a single word can be so evil that you have to resort to code to refer to it, no matter in which context or whether or not you're quoting.
Yes, you shouldn't call people that way - and if you do, that is a clear sign of a racist mindset. But treating the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that must be purged from everything is not much better than medieval magical thinking.
Nonetheless, the continued reproduction of that word makes it "acceptable" to be used, and every time affected persons have to read that, it's bad for them.
That’s nothing new sadly, especially in academia. It used to be considered proper literary form to “translate” how people actually spoke to “proper English” and you can imagine the demographic of the people doing the “translating.”
See for example Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" [1] about one of the last living former slaves in the US. It was published a few years ago nearly a century after it was written because the author refused to white wash the subject’s language and couldn’t get it published in her life time.
Hell that criticism could easily be leveled at some of the most popular western canon like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon:_The_Story_of_the_...
As far as I can tell, a major component of woke bowdlerization of the past seems to be finding depictions of black people and either eliminating them or making them conform to the idealistic stereotypes of modern white liberals. That's stacking stereotypes on stereotypes, and the truth of the black experience gets buried even deeper.
The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern novel as a racist stereotype.