User:BTMM Eric/scrap3

Five Little N***** Boys shooting game (Chad Valley)

A fairground-style shooting game made by Chad Valley with five childlike cutout characters attached to a horizontal bar, the aim being to knock them down with an elastic band fired from a long-barrelled "rubber band gun".

The game is not on display.

Cultural context

This game has to be the most gobsmackingly awful awful piece in the museum's entire collection. Seeing it in real life is, frankly, a surreal experience.

The conundrum that a museum faced when confronted with an item like this is ... what the heck does one do with the dratted thing?

Clearly, it has to be preserved for historical reasons, if only to remind people just how bad some things were regarding racial issues, within living memory.

However, as a toy museum, many of our visitors are very young children with their parents. Children who may identify with the figures that are supposed to be "shot" could find the imagery disturbing and upsetting, and children who don't identify with the figures might come away with the impression that racial stereotyping and violence is in some way clever or funny, is legitimised by the existence of the game, and is to be emulated (especially if this shocks grown-ups, because doing things that shock adults sometimes gives children a sense of power). Clearly, the piece can't be on general display. This isn't censorship, as we have a lot of other more popular games in storage that also aren't on display because we don't have the display space (and we're a toy and model museum rather than a game museum) - the only reason why this game is notable is because of its shocking nature.

It's essentially a matter of appropriate display context – yes, the game is a historical data-point that requires preservation, just like images of Auschwitz prisoners or serial-killer victims ... but a parent does not expect to have their threeyearold child suddenly confronted with those images while on a nice visit to see some toy trains and cuddly teddybears.

If the piece is going to be preserved, and is reckoned to be historically important, and is NOT going to be on display, then its existence needs to be listed online.