10 Classic Children's Books That Are Actually Racist

9. The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's early 20th-century novel about a young English girl who is forced to move back home after her parents die in India and discovers the eponymous greenery has been adapted into stage plays and films numerous times. It's not hard to see why: the story connects with young children who feel alienated from the adult world and wish to create their own to hide from them and features many sweet-natured moral lessons about caring for and about others. Well, most of them are sweet. After the protagonist, Mary, arrives at her new home in Yorkshire, a servant named Martha remarks that she thought the little girl would be black as she had come from India. Mary is upset by this comment, replying that "blacks are not people," a pretty reprehensible stance that no-one ever corrects. She later has to change out of her black clothes into white ones before she can find the garden and the book features several more highly unnecessary epithets against Indians and dark-skinned peoples in general. Maybe little Mary never needed to leave that garden after all...