conuly

I hadn't heard that Sambo was already an offensive term when she wrote the book. Where did it come from, and what did it mean exactly?

We've got an edition with the original illustrations here, and they aren't all that much of a caricature. Looking at the pictures of actual children from that area (http://www.foodrelief.org/articles/51/1/Update-on-Tamil-Nadu-Relief-Efforts/Page1.html), especially the ones in profile, one can see that some of the supposedly-offensive 'stereotypical' facial traits in the illustrations are actually pretty common in that region.

There's nothing wrong with them, either; they look just fine. I know, some unscientific assholes of the last century tried to put across the idea that black people were related to apes by drawing them with chimpanzee faces, and Sambo does look kind of monkey-like in some pictures. But hello, it's the year 2009; the Human Genome Project was finished years ago; surely by now, everyone but the fanatic Fundies knows that we're all equally related to apes, so the pot's got no room to be calling the kettle black, as it were.