Uncle Remus museum still grapples with race

The Wrens Nest and the Uncle Remus stories are racist only if you want them to be. Just like most of the other "racist" issues today, what one perceives as racist, I may not. I doubt that there were racist motives in the Harris stories, after all, he got them from slaves who created them and told them to him. If you just look at them as cute fantasy stories, you won't find them racist either.

I read those stories as a child. After reading this article, it seems to me that the stories might have been lost altogether, had Harris not committed them to writing.

The Uncle Remus tales are more than just "cute fantasy stories;" each has a moral lesson all children of every race need to learn. They are perhaps a gentle African equivalent of the original Grimm brothers' tales, which were quite grim and not subject to happy endings, unlike today's bowdlerized versions. 

Writing the Uncle Remus stories in "black dialect" made them honest and believable, if more difficult to read. They were after all, tales told orally for generations, and Harris wrote what he heard spoken by caring people who happened to be poor, uneducated Southern blacks. Their grammar was that of the native languages of the men and women brought to this country and expected to learn English but forbidden any education, so continued to use their old grammar with their new words.   

It doesn't matter that Harris was white; he saved Uncle Remus for all children. It just wouldn't have been the same had he used the educated white grammar of his time.

Parents should read the stories aloud to their children, using whatever variation of English speech is most comfortable.