From the beginning of the book, black people are dehumanized. In the preface it states that “black children abound and tigers are every day affairs,” speaking about black children as if they are animals or something unhuman.  The story commences with the protagonist standing in his underwear, then moving onto an illustration of his barefoot mother and lastly his well dressed yet barefoot father. Eventually Sambo ends up with the clothing that his parents gave him, oddly enough he gets shoes from his barefoot father. Apparently, the outfit he was given made him feel very important and this appealed to the talking tigers. Four different tigers tried to intimidate Sambo but he convinced each of them to spare his life by offering to give them a piece of his beautiful ensemble. After acquiring their new item, each tiger believed that they were now the grandest tiger of in the jungle conveying the message that the outfit carried power. I am curious as to why Sambo would choose to go parading through a jungle with a new beautiful outfit if he knew that there were tigers who want to eat him. It seems like self-sabotage, either that or he was utterly foolish. This story reminds me a bit of Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” because both have protagonists who believe that their clothing make them important but end up exposed and vulnerable after giving their power away to wretched creatures. I think that Bannerman, treated Sambo like a mindless dress-up doll and played into the fact that children like to dress up dolls. This also allowed the reader to treat Sambo as inferior and a source of amusement just like the Coon Alphabet did.