Yes, Raold Dahl was racist and worse, although his stories are brilliant classics. Yes, Americans have an ugly history of racism and worse, though also capable of wondrous achievements. How are we helping children by shielding their young minds from the complexity of their reality? Do we really want them to grow up incapable of reasoning about difficult topics?
Hiding the truth beneath a layer of sugar can be actively harmful. Should we refrain from teaching children how bad the Nazis were, for fear that we will upset them? If we do that, they might grow up with only a surface understanding, and come to the misinformed conclusion that Hitler wasn’t all that bad. After all, the Nazis had better looking uniforms than anyone else.
The only way your child can ever learn to safely cross the road is to first understand that cars can kill you. And the only way we can prevent a repeat of horrors like genocide and slavery is to teach our children what to avoid in the society that they will build together when they grow up and inherit this world.
I’m not certain what to think of the Roald Dahl edits (which are being made by publishers, not because of some pressure campaign, as I understand it), but I think we were already hiding the truth about Dahl, before these edits happened.
However, I’m not really sure kids are taught to read books like Dahl’s the way you’re talking about. I don’t think we talk to kids about Dahl the same way we talk about the Holocaust. Because he and his ideas aren’t history with a capital H or literature with a capital L, we treated his books as something to be read uncritically, as something that is fun, whose assertions can be trusted, and whose lessons are to be accepted.
In fact, that is how all literature is taught to kids that age, which may be appropriate for their level of development. After all, they are still learning to read chapter books at that point. Rarely are kids taught to question E.B. White’s arachnid sympathy or examine Beverly Cleary’ s feminist biases.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I was taught to question the author while reading a book until late in middle school.
Anyway, for better or for worse, when kids read books uncritically, it is dangerous when a book assumes that racist truth is the truth. That’s the main way that it’s different from talking about historical events like slavery. So, maybe it’s the practice of uncritical book reading that’s the harmful.
But again, part of what makes this is complex issue is that some kids can’t or won’t do that early on.