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?
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 .
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 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!