Talk:The Adventure of the Yellow Face/Archive 1

Archive 1

Myth (re: "anti-racism")

It's anti-racist in a way, but also perpetuates the popular myth of the time that marrying someone with even a trace of African ancestry can lead to having a child much darker than either of the parents... AnonMoos (talk) 14:50, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

It's still anti-racist. A misconception about genetics does not equal racism!109.151.174.183 (talk) 19:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Robert Graves reported in Good-bye to All That that one of his relatives advised him not to marry his first wife, since that relative claimed that she had a remote black ancestor, so that a child of theirs could turn out "coal black". That person sounds more like a racist than anti-racist to me... AnonMoos (talk) 05:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

That certainly sounds racist, but that is not the attitude of Munro in the story or, by implication, the message of the story itself. The story portrays the child extremely sympathetically and Munro's decision to care for her as the right one. Besides, the story doesn't perpetuate the idea of a mixed race child being darker than either parent. In the story, the father was black. The child is described as taking more after her father than her mother, i.e. she looks more black than white. That's perfectly plausible. The mother is also described as expressing regret that this is the case, an attitude that doesn't exactly age quite so well. But overall this is a story of a child whose skin colour is irrelevant to her loving mother or to her unsuspecting stepfather, where it's the attitude of wider society that leads her mother to try to keep her hidden and even make her cover her face. The unjudgemental depiction of that wider attitude is certainly uncomfortable reading today, but the story certainly implies a deep criticism of it. 144.173.238.157 (talk) 10:21, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The story says "It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine. It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was." If two mixed-race people marry, then it's sometimes possible to have a child with darker skin color than either of his/her parents, as has been reported in several newspaper articles about twins who have very different skin colors ([1] etc.). If a white person (without non-white ancestry in recent generations) marries a mixed-race person, then it's very implausible. I'm sure Doyle was trying to be anti-racist, but he perpetuated a misconception which appears to have originated in a racist / anti-"miscegenation" context (see my comment "05:12, 11 December 2012" above)... AnonMoos (talk) 07:20, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

You've only shown the circumstances of the story to be implausible, not impossible.

"Once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes

The Adventure of the Yellow Face is one of the most genuinely anti-racist stories you will ever read. It certainly makes a much stronger and bolder blow against racism than most of the Marxist pap you'll encounter in college English departments. -- 15:17, 25 May 2017‎ 168.137.100.22

It's not absolutely impossible either that all the air molecules in a room will spontaneously go into its left half, leaving the right half in a pure vacuum -- just statistically overwhelmingly improbable. I give Arthur Conan Doyle full credit for trying to be anti-racist in his own particular way, but it would have been even better if he hadn't structured the plot of "The Adventure of the Yellow Face" around an old wives' tale or urban legend (since revealed to be factually false) that originated from anti-miscegenationist folklore. AnonMoos (talk) 18:23, 30 May 2017 (UTC)