The Failure of a Colour-Blind Approach to Mitigate the Racism of Enid Blyton’s Twentieth-Century Children’s Fiction

This paper analyses the textual and visual modifications made to Enid Blyton’s Adventure (1944–1955) series. Using Blyton’s revised books as a case study, I employ critical race theory and critical white studies to demonstrate the futility of adopting a colour-blind approach to mitigate the racism of older, classic children’s texts. Colour-blindness as a policy is criticised by scholars of critical race theory for its ineffectiveness in resolving the problems of racism. While this approach is perceived by children’s literature publishers as a straightforward, non-disruptive solution to prolong the lifeline of texts, the implications of erasing or concealing the racial identities of characters of colour are ignored by publishers and editors of Blyton’s books. The edits made to her books are confined to superficial changes which fail to alter the texts’ ideological foundations: Blyton’s modernised texts retain the core values of imperialism - the supremacy of the white, English race and the “rightful” position of dominance that white Englishness occupies - but in a modernised format which is ostensibly racially ‘colour-blind’. Through analysing the evolving versions of Blyton’s fiction, I demonstrate how applying critical white studies to children’s literature facilitates a deeper understanding of the ways in which whiteness structures and determines social hierarchies in children’s texts.