Though, to be fair, I didn’t really start thinking about race, the history of race relations, and issues of racism until I was a teenager.

I didn’t know I had been so ignorant, insensitive and immune as a child to the inherent racism in this story. Yikes! That is not what I want to be reading to my boy. However, he gives them the slip again with help from the king’s son, who asks the doctor to bleach his skin white in return, so he can look like one of the fairytale princes he admires. After escaping the tribe, the doctor is ultimately recaptured by them. It’s lucky I didn’t go any further in The Story of Doctor Dolittle. We are very careful in choosing the books we read to him and we to stock his library with as many titles featuring children of color. I’m of nebulous European stock, so our son is biracial, his skin a royal bronze. We were both disgusted by the characterization of the African characters in the book, but for her it was personal–she was born in Ghana in western Africa. My wife was understandably angry that I had gone as far as I had. So did the author, who described them using shallow stereotypes that would once have been charitably referred to as the product of a colonialist worldview, but now would simply be called racist. When I flipped the page and saw the illustration of the king and his wife–their lips and ears oversized, their bodies muscular, yet somehow misshapen–I realized the illustrator saw them as caricatures, not characters. He is captured by the Jolliginki tribe and taken before their leader. Dolittle heads to Africa to help the monkeys overcome a mysterious deadly disease laying waste to their population. Sure, the language seemed stilted by modern standards, but it was an otherwise timeless tale that seemed to be bringing him as much pleasure as it had once brought me.īut then Dr. It was a sweet, sometimes silly saga of doctor who can speak to animals and cures them of their ills. The first few chapters unfolded as I remembered. Recently, I was reading my 4-year-old son a book I loved as a child, Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle.

The story of doctor dolittle