There were minstrel shows and no one thought twice about it. I didn't know years later I'd be upset retroactively about how African Americans were treated. I didn't know about the underground railway. I heard about Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves but I didn't know that was why he was assassinated. i didn't know any better when I was a little girl. I didn't know a lot about a lot. I grew up and changed a lot. But growing up and changing a lot doesn't always affect everyone in the same way. I wonder why that is? Do you know why that is?
We all develop in our ways as individuals because we are influenced by so many complex external factors combined with our own personalities, educational abilities, interests, tastes etc.
I recall similar books etc.
A very popular 1960s British TV show (I don't know if BBC or ITV) was The Black & White Minstrels - all good singers, yes, but the supposedly-coloured members of the troupe were the stereotyped white artistes blacked-up.
I remember our Dad had a children's compendium dating from the 1930s, whose fictional stories included some depicting some Colonial type or other in some part of Africa. As far as I recall, these didn't actively set out to demean the Africans but did rather patronise them as jolly useful chaps for helping move the English characters' baggage etc.
The same book also contained those appalling children-"improving" Struwwelpeter poems from 19C Germany, and their unpleasantly graphical illustrations. I recall one had its central character having his fingers snipped off by huge scissors wielded by some sort of (supernatural?) tailor figure; but I can't remember the story's topic and supposed moral.
Perhaps worse, when I was about 6 some friend of my parents, a woman I never knew as she had emigrated to Tasmania, sent me as Christmas a children's story-book based on life in an imaginary Tasmanian native family. This was in the 1950s. It was written no doubt by a European-descendant author, from the view of its own children, whom it called 'picaninnies'. It was not actually unkind, certainly not intentionally, to the aborigines, though rather twee in that sentimentally patronising way once thought acceptable; and it was published years before I learnt the island's original Dutch settlers had more or less wiped the residents out. I'd forgotten it until my sisters found it when clearing our late parents' home - they asked me if I wanted it. Not ruddy likely! We buried it in a box-full of books for donating to a charity-shop. I rather doubt English shop volunteers in 2001 would have dared put a 1950s Tasmanian book illustrated with drawings of nude aboriginal children, in its window!