In The Weekly Standard's online edition, Lee Brockhorn has a somewhat-ambivalent piece about the tendency for networks to selectively remove insensitive language from old movies (like "queers,"), and to edit out racially insensitive bits from old cartoons.

Mr. Brockhorn, I think you're mostly on the mark. I was a little disappointed, however, that you defended editing old cartoons. I'm well into my 30s, and I love old cartoons--Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and 1950s Hannah & Barbera cartoons especially. Don't be defensive man, a lot of that old stuff is great! I also share your instincts, but I think you're afraid to take them to their logical conclusions.

During the Victorian era, a man name Thomas Bowdler...

...made himself famous among lovers of Shakespeare. He noted that Shakespeare's plays were vibrant and exciting, and the language was beautiful. But they were also full of potty jokes and double-entendres and even outright sexuality. (They are also, by the way, sometimes full of racist and sexist humor, but presumably Bowdler didn't mind that.) So he set about publishing edited versions of plays like Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, taking out all the naughty bits and potty humor.

If you look up "bowdlerization" in the dictionary, you'll find a perfect definition of what the networks are doing. I think Bowdler was wrong to do it. I think they are too.

There exists an old Warner Bros cartoon that very few people alive have ever seen. It was directed by Robert Clampett, who is generally acknowledged to be second only to Chuck Jones among the great Warner Bros cartoonists. The cartoon is called "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs," and it is a spoof on the old Snow White story, set in World War II Harlem. It features an almost entirely black voice cast, including Dorothy Dandridge's mother and sister. It's also a musical; the artists and directors and musical supervisors spent quite a bit of time in black nightclubs, and wound up paying a number of black artists (like the Dandridges) to help out with the music and voices, even getting their advice on how to choreograph the dance numbers. In a poll of critics, animation directors, and film historians a few years ago, it was voted one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time.

Unless you look very hard for a 2nd- or 3rd-hand copy on bootleg video somewhere, you will never, ever see it in your lifetime. And that's a damn shame.

I also find the whole idea of taking the Hattie McDaniel-type black maid character and changing her voice to be an execrable bit of racial condescension (or self-hatred, if you happen to be black). It assumes that there is something demeaning about being a maid, and worse, that you are pathetic if you talk like one of those characters, even though that was exactly how many black people talked, and how some still do. Such characters were familiar to countless people, because they weren't stereotypes, they were real people.

I have DVDs of un-bowdlerized wartime cartoons, including an old Chuck Jones cartoon that shows Bugs Bunny in blackface. Every time I see it I'm a little disturbed. But I'm also amused, because it's funny. Why the hell should I be embarassed to say so? No it does not mean I'm a racist at heart. It means I have a sense of humor and take simple joy in the absurd.

You want to know what I think will signal the end of racism in America? When we can see someone in blackface and just chuckle like we all did when we saw Eddie Murphy made up as a white man on Saturday Night Live. We'll be over race issues when black people can look at some old Bugs Bunny in Blackface number, laugh, and say, "look, he thinks he's a brother" and just let it go at that. I'll be perfectly willing to laugh with them when the jokes cut my way, too: black comedians sometimes absolutely nail the quirks of middle-class white America.

And by the way, the first time I heard that black people sometimes call white people "Casper," I laughed for hours. I still laugh every time I hear it. Even today, you can just look at me and say, "shut up, Casper!" and get a chuckle.

I am tired of the double-standard which says that it's okay for Mel Brooks or Jerry Seinfeld to poke fun at Jews because they are Jewish, okay for every black comedian in America to make endless jokes about blackness, "Asian" comedians can make fun of Asians, Latinos to make fun of Latinos, but let me make a joke like that and it'll call down the wrath of the Gods. (And if I do it at work I could lose my job. Nice, huh?)

There is something deeply disturbing about a world where it's okay to pay money to see black people make fun of themselves, Jewish people to make fun of themselves, Latinos to make fun of themselves, and so on. The hidden message: "Dance for me, Jew, and make a fool of yourself for my amusement." "Dance, negro, and tell me more about your people's quirks." That seems like all we're saying here, when we say it's okay to laugh at people, just not with them.

Some in the black and Jewish and Latino and other aggrieved communities have made exactly that point: that Mel Brooks needs to stop embarassing the Jews, that the Wayans brothers need to stop embarassing black people, and so on. But I think that's the wrong attitude.

I suggest that when we can all tell jokes, and no one will be so prejudiced as to assume malicious intent, only then will America be over her race problems.

I'd like my son to grow up in such a world. I really would.