I find the idea very clever - instead of connecting EAST with RIGHT and SOUTH with DOWN it assosiates the directions with well know idioms - everybody calls the wild west wild west and the cold north cold north and there`s nothing wrong with that. If they`ve ment something racist they would have put human faces. Moreover, this picture is giving you a subject for discussion which is waht pictures in textbooks are supposed to do (you are just having the discussion in the wrong language ;)).