The Tarzan franchise cemented racist ideas by making Whites teachers of Africans

Evidence

It is hard to imagine a more famous fictional character during the twentieth century than Tarzan—and it is hard to imagine a more racist plot than what Burroughs wrote up in the Tarzan adventure series books, which he was writing and publishing almost up until his death in 1950. The plot became a Hollywood staple, reappearing again and again, most recently in the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. Burroughs made the association between animals, savages, and Africa permanent in the American mind. The defining message of the Tarzan series was clear: whether on Wall Street or in the forests of Central Africa, swinging through Greek literature or swinging from trees, White people will do it better than the African apelike children, so much better that Whites will always, the world over, become teachers of African people. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 789

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for Kendi’s core claim that racist ideas (Tarzan’s ‘White teachers’ theme) are produced to justify the racial hierarchy — connects to the ignorance→hate→discrimination inversion, here cultural production creating the ideas that rationalize policy.
• SEED: Angles on how a single fictional character (Tarzan) functioned as mass-produced racist ideology in the century before social media — the ‘cultural infrastructure of racist ideas.’