Six Dr Seuss books pulled over racist imagery
scmp.com
scmp.com
How long until more Simpsons episodes get pulled?
"We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light. We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with."
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...
Are you keeping them because they're books and movies that mean something to you, or are you keeping them because they have objectionable content?
> And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, features a “Chinese boy” with a rice bowl and chopsticks
This is the level we've stooped to now? Should Chinese restaurants stop offering chopsticks?
If the material does not stand on it's own, then it serves no valid purpose to artficialy prop it up.
It's not censorship to remove something from being actively fed to children. It's still allowed to exist as historical artifacts. No one arrests you for posessing a copy. You are not Jesus's persecuted followers hiding from the Romans.
Well, in this case, the copyright holder.
> Its removal came after authors Mo Willems, Mike Curato and Lisa Yee co-signed a letter calling for its removal. They described the imagery as “a jarring racial stereotype of a Chinese man, who is depicted with chopsticks, a pointed hat, and slanted slit eyes. We find this caricature of ‘the Chinaman’ deeply hurtful, and have concerns about children’s exposure to it.”
The point is that this stereotypical description is negative.
Someone else decided what they wish to say.
It's odd the article says "boy" when the original 1937 Seuss description was "Chinaman"[1], and the updated 1973 version was "Chinese man". Also updated was the removal of the character's pigtail and the yellow skin.
It kept the slanted-eyes and pointed hat, which was part of the racist stereotype depiction of the era. See Seuss's war-time cartoons at https://apjjf.org/2017/16/Minear.html for other examples of slanted eyes in how he portrayed Americans of Japanese descent as 5th columnists ready to blow up the West Coast. That was mentioned in the article; I link to it to provide context.
Seuss made those edits in 1973 because he changed as a person. As he grew older, he worked to fight stereotypes and xenophobia.
It appears the 1937 depiction was intended to be hurtful, in that it dehumanizes the character by reducing him to a stereotype. Seuss found it problematic enough to change it.
How can you determine if the 1973 edit removed all of the intended sting?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)#Literary_use points out that by 1937 "Chinaman" was a widely-used derogatory term, to the point that in 1929 Ronald Knox's "Ten Commandments" of Detective Fiction included 'No Chinaman must figure in the story. (Note: This is a reference to common use of heavily stereotyped Asian characters in detective fiction of the time)', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Knox .
It's not, I'm just wondering the rationale. For my part: I'm not going to get rid of my copies of those 3 Seuss books I love—but nor am I going to grab copies of the other 3 just because they're no longer being printed.
Edit: ha! I even called it "banned", when it's anything but. Removed!
Let's get over the clickbaity title and look at their actual argument. They think that it is worth cancelling these things because of "racist imagery." But who are they to decide what is and isn't racist? The goalposts literally shift on this every day. I grew up saying "I don't see color", and now this isn't even OK to say anymore.
Are we really going to let a bunch of totalitarian journalists anoint themselves as the ministry of truth? Does anyone seriously want to live in a world where journalists have the power to decide the definition of racism and immediately convict those who don't meet the new criteria?
I don't really see a way out of this for now, because it appears that Twitter and journalists have the CEOs of America by the balls. I think we are pretty much going to see a major economic civil war in this country, with mass quittings and firings, before people actually come to their senses.
The people who made the decision about problematic content here were Seuss Enterprises, LLC, the owners of the content.
> I grew up saying "I don't see color", and now this isn't even OK to say anymore.
Um, it was never okay to say: this has been mocked in popular culture for decades as a signal of privilege and avoidance of real racial issues.
Of course, if you really see people as individuals, you probably won’t deny that racial and ethnic identity and experiences tied to both that and ascribed race/ethnicity (which often, but not always, correspond to identity) are often, especially for people in racial and/or ethnic groups that have been marginalized (no matter how much that might not have been by you), an important part of who they are and what you need to understand to understand them.
Viewing people in the context of a counterfactual idealized world isn't seeing them as individuals, but as figurines in your personal fantasy diorama.
I know I'm wasting air here, but honestly, I do think views like this are the problem. You may think you are helping, but this does nothing but divide people.
I suspect that you think dragonwriter meant that I should assume "hmm, black person, therefore has been on the receiving end of racism". I didn't read it that way. I agree with you that it would be wrong to make such an assumption (or any assumption based on their race). But I think dragonwriter's point is different: Their race has shaped their lives in certain ways. Don't ignore that part of who they are.
"While the vast majority of the works he produced are positive and inspiring, Ted Geisel also drew a handful of early images, which are disturbing. These racially stereotypical drawings were hurtful then and are still hurtful today. However, Ted’s cartoons and books also reflect his evolution. Later works, such as The Sneetches or Horton Hears a Who!, emphasize inclusion and acceptance. Ted would later edit some of his inappropriate images, depicting his characters in a more respectful manner."