Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
[...] Going back to the racism issue--I didn't remember this before, but the indigenous tribe were cannibals; white boy Tarzan, though, had magically developed scruples against eating human flesh by virtue of his superior heredity. [...]
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I still come back to thinking this was more about class prejudices than racism. The book a few times highlights the savagery of the white sailors, which Tarzan compares unfavourably to his animal companions. And also this previously quoted line: "To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State—a pitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe."
Another line emphasising Tarzan's superior breeding: "It was a stately and gallant little compliment performed with the grace and dignity of utter unconsciousness of self. It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate."
The book places much emphasis of the importance of his noble birth - so not racism as such, or so it seems to me, just: everyone else is crap except those of noble birth. Although, as I noted earlier, there are a few places where individual difference is allowed to creep in as a force separate to breeding.