Henty's popularity amongst homeschoolers is not without controversy. Quoting from the chapter of "By Sheer Pluck" called "The Negro Character" ("like children"), American television host and political commentator Rachel Maddow called Henty's writings "spectacularly racist". Carpenter and Pritchard note that while "Henty's work is indeed full of racial (and class) stereotypes", he sometimes created sympathetic ethnic minority characters, such as the Indian servant who marries a white woman in "With Clive in India", and point out Henty admired the Turkish Empire. Some even accuse Henty of holding blacks in utter contempt, and this is expressed in novels such as "By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War" and "A Roving Commission, or, Through the Black Insurrection at Hayti". Kathryne S. McDorman states Henty disliked blacks and also, in Henty's fiction, that "Boers and Jews were considered equally ignoble". In "By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War", Mr. Goodenough, an entomologist remarks to the hero: “They are just like children ... They are always either laughing or quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent, but will work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid beyond. The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. ... They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery.”