‘T’ Is For … Thomas The Tank Engine Is Also Racist
Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe TV show “Thomas and Friends” is racist, wrote Tracy van Syke for the Guardian in July, because good engines puff white smoke and bad engines puff black smoke. She is so relieved her son doesn’t have “a manic train fascination like so many other children,” because although the show “seems to impart good moral lessons about hard work and friendship,” it is in reality “concealing some pretty twisted, anachronistic messages” — it’s racist, classist, sexist and anti-environmentalist. The smoke is just one example. “I’d like to think there was a good environmental message in there,” she writes, “but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke … it’s not hard to make the leap into the race territory.”
Another person who has no trouble leaping into “the race territory” is author and activist Leonard Zeskind, who said at a National White Privilege Conference that the entire Tea Party is is marked by a contagious racism. “There has been a longitudinal study that find the longer you are in the Tea Party, the more racist you become,” he declared, and said the movement is like other white nationalist groups. “Is it racist?” he asked, and then answered himself: “Yes.”
The Tea Party rallying cry, “Take back our country,” is racist, Eugene Robinson wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in May. “In general, I try to focus on what a person does or says rather than speculate on what he or she is. How can I really know what’s in another person’s heart?” he asks, before implying that anyone holding a “Take Back Our Country” sign is racist, since they started using the phrase after a black man became president.
Read more from this story HERE.
