We talked about the The Dark Side of ‘The Arabian Nights, a news article. It discussed some of the problematic sides of the Arabian Nights. We mainly talked about racism, and how it’s been ingrained into the story for centuries. We talked about how racism is abundant in this world, and not just a product of the west. Another interesting thing was seeing racism on an equal footing, from both the white people to the blacks and from the black people to the whites. It was even mentioned how the author of the article talks about racism but also mentioned how all the characters are equal, making it seem almost oxymoronic. The history and accuracy was also discussed, and we talked about all the anonymous authors who translated or rewrote the stories and passed it down to future generations. Since they were anonymous, it might even be a reason why they felt more comfortable writing otherwise unspeakable things. A major thing we discussed was the British and French translators increasing the degree of the racism and sexuality. This might have been to either sell more books and earn more money, or to plant a seed of discrimination in people’s heads, and associate certain people of colour with certain actions. We ended with talking about acts of racism today, and having a sentence or two about how police officers are sometimes pre-disposed to think people of colour have high crime rates.
