"you ought to have made her face all pink"
My job at Claremont Used Books and Prints involved, more than dusting and sorting and selling, a great deal of research. I was (honored!) with the task of inspecting the quality (and estimating the "value") of a collection of antique editions of Little Black Sambo. Little Black Sambo is one of the most popular children's stories in the English language, and has been interpreted and misinterpreted by a rough zillion of children's book artists since British colonialist Helen Bannerman wrote the original in 1899. The history of U.S. racism is documented in the pages of this ever-misinterpreted classic. The original is set ambiguously in somewhat-India, and Sambo is nothing more than a clever and very well loved child. Later interpretations move Sambo to Africa, then to the slave plantations of the United States; with each move the child and his family grow more grotesque. The changes are mostly in the hands of the illustrators, as the text is mostly unchanged.
The worst example I found was illustrated by the great John. R. Neill, illustrator of the Oz books. His slave-Sambo (I cannot find illustrations online) resembles a monkey, and the child's mother is the same fat-lipped grinning "n----r mammy" one still finds on sugar packets in Spain. The story of Topsy, a character from Uncle Tom's Cabin, is tellingly packaged in the same book.
Neill was brilliant, but limited. His figures fall nowhere between ethereal and grotesque. Ozma is ethereal, Jack Pumpkinhead is grotesque. Ojo the Munchkin is ethereal; Scraps the Patchwork girl of Oz is grotesque. The little white girl in "Topsy" is ethereal; Topsy is grotesque.
I can't find a picture of Neill's Topsy on the internet, but she looks like a black version of Scraps (above, leaping).