Racism and Regulation in media

It is obvious that there are evident discriminatory expressions against Jews in story of The Merchant of Venice written by Shakespeare. Sherlock, the Jewish lender, is depicted as such a cold-blooded and greedy man. In many editions, he is introduced just as ‘Jew’ and frequently not called in his own name, but just ‘Jew’. We can assume that the fact that Sherlock is Jews is most important for the people, and his race is the priority for his identity in the story.

The story has written as comedy, but when we change our position into Sherlock side, it is such a tragedy about the old man who suffered for the racism and forced to convert to Christianity. There are lots of expression that shows racism against Jews including Sherlock’s speech, but I never heard that there are regulation on publication of The Merchant of Venice. It is very different from what happened to The Story of the Little Black Sambo, published in 1899 in Britain for the first time. The book brought about controversy against racial discrimination to black people and many of editions became went out of print since early 1930’s. Of course, there are also differences that it took such a long time for several studies started to insist that The Merchant of the Venice is the story includes stereotype of Jews and discrimination against them since the piece was published for the first time and it has already been classics at that time and The Story of Little Black Sambo was not.

Series of Dr.Dolittle is also one of the examples of publishing regulation. In the first book, Dr.Dolitlle went to Africa and he was be arrested by African black King. The King asked him to grant his wish instead of release, and the wish was to make King to transfer into whites because he was in love with white girl who rejected him because of his skin colour. This part of story has made alteration in 1997, and new story doesn’s mention about skin colour at all.

Nowadays, we can recognize how racism infested the time through The Merchant of Venice, but what about corrections of the part which is inconvenient such as Dr. Dollitle or The Story if Little Black Sambo?? I think it should be preserved and inherited as it is with annotation about racism in the story to tell people about the fact of racism especially in these kinds of juvenile stories.