Rastamouse

One of my friends pointed me to this episode of Rastamouse.  From my sense of watching this show, the idea is that the mice are meant to be Jamaican. 
The question I'm struggling with is if this is offensive.  On one hand, Rastamouse is produced by the BBC, and England has a large, often ignored, community of people with Jamaican ancestry.  Most of the children's shows out there are geared towards white Brits, so it is possible that someone is trying to represent that community and write a show for them.
At the same time, depicting a minority as an animal is inherently problematic.  And then for it to be an animal that is associated with being feeble, weak, scared and a scanvanger?  Not good.

Little Black Sambo Books

The University of Chicago has just received a donation of Little Black Sambo books. For those of you lucky enough not to have seen these stories, they revolved aroung a stereotypical-looking little black boy, written by a British woman and set in India.
Sambo still lives on. I have British friends, one only a few years older than myself, who remembers her Grandma sewing Sambo/golliwog dolls for both herself and her younger brother when they were children. When she told me that, I was mortified on her behalf that this would be acceptable. These images promote ideas about those of African descent having comical features and being toys to laugh at.
The problem with Sambo is obvious, and I'm thankful that this was one racially-charged image I was able to avoid as a child. But I'm glad this collection will be at a university, where researchers can study it and say "Yes, this is another example of how terribly racist society was, and how they were teaching it to children."