10 Classic Children's Books That Are Actually Racist

2. Sherlock Holmes

Holmes and Watson require no introduction, being one of the most iconic (possibly THE most iconic) fictional crime-fighting duos in history. In the most recent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's best known creation, the BBC's Sherlock, Holmes is an equal opportunities offender: he doesn't care if you're black, white, gay, straight, trans or even extra-terrestrial; everyone irritates him just the same. Unfortunately, the great detective from Baker Street has a bit more of a prejudicial streak in some of Conan Doyle's original texts, including a rather offensive encounter in The Adventure of the Three Gables. Holmes is pursuing a former slave, Steve Dixie, and once he catches up to him, tells the man that he won't ask him to sit, "for I don't like the smell of you," and that giving Dixie "any lip" is "certainly the last thing you need". This is all capped off, of course, by Conan Doyle's faithful narrator Watson informing us that Holmes was "staring at our visitor's hideous mouth." This isn't an isolated incident, either: The Sign of the Four features Tonga, a character from the Andaman Islands, and an in-universe reference book tells Holmes that his people "are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes and distorted features... They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs, or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast." Which is about as bad at you can get for an author regularly championed as being liberal and progressive.