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It's weird that these books got pulled from circulation in the first place; the offensiveness is relatively mild (especially for the time), and quite a few of these have historical and literary significance (including the very first children's book published under the "Dr. Seuss" pen name).

eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies is just icing on the weirdness cake. This is the same website where searching for "minstrel" or "mammy" turns up a veritable smörgåsbord of racist caricatures, and yet some Dr. Seuss books cross the line for them?

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Ebay didn't decide it unilaterally, it is in conjunction with the Dr. Seuss estate and Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP

Really? Suppressing secondary markets probably falls afoul of copyright law.

I really miss the anti-copyright radicalism that used to suffuse hacker culture in the early naughts. The Seuss estate should have the same power to limit publication of these books as Shakespeare’s heirs would have to stop publication of the Merchant of Venice.

And if that sounds like it’s going to far can they at least have no say in the right to resale?

> eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies

eBay is not "unilaterally" deciding anything. I can't remember the last time I bought or sold anything on eBay for instance. As I see it, they probably want to avoid the resulting controversy from any of these items, and don't want anything to do with them on their platform.

As an immigrant to the US, this is what I don't get. Isn't the whole idea of capitalism supposed to be that eBay's delisting is an opportunity for ten other websites specializing in obscure Dr. Seuss books to pop up and eat their business? [1]

Or would you rather have one centralized government agency in charge of deciding which books can and can't be sold?

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[1] What I personally suspect (without much evidence) is that there is very little of a secondary market for these books. Sure, some are going for $500 because people will collect anything, but the person simply doesn't care about them one way or the other.

> Isn't the whole idea of capitalism supposed to be that eBay's delisting is an opportunity for ten other websites specializing in obscure Dr. Seuss books to pop up and eat their business?

It is. And don't get me wrong: eBay's well within their rights to restrict what people can buy and sell on their platform. It's just weird that this is where they draw the line; the message here seems to be "we're totally fine with selling things depicting racist caricatures, except for these old children's books".

That is: eBay having the right to do something does not make them above criticism or scrutiny.

> That is: eBay having the right to do something does not make them above criticism or scrutiny.

Yes, the inconsistent policy applications you mention does mean that eBay is a terrible site if you want to find well-vetted products. Honestly, I have never gotten a particularly "trustworthy" vibe from eBay, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise to me.

I agree with you that it's a little weird that eBay has decided to draw the line there, but you might give a second thought to what constitutes "relatively mild offensiveness".

These racist caricatures have a long and ugly history, and they persist. They may seem mild to you, but to people who have to deal with racist caricatures every day of their lives, it's unpleasant. Not just having to explain to your children why they've been presented like that in this book targeted to them, but why all of the other children they know will have been exposed to the same images.

I don't think you intended to diminish that in your post, but I think it's worth taking note when you tell other people that they shouldn't be offended by something when you don't experience it.

Take a look at the images, and you can see why the publishers felt that they were better off without them. As for why eBay decided to glom onto that... that I can't say.

https://images.indianexpress.com/2021/03/dr-seuss.jpg

Maybe I'm old fashioned but all I see is a smiling boy, in traditional Chinese dress, eating what appears to be rice out of a bowl with chopsticks. Are there actually Chinese people who find this offensive? Why?

As someone with an Asian background, it's not offensive at all, and I can't think of an Asian person who would find it offensive.

This is just cancel culture playing out. Weak, risk-averse executives cowardly bending the knee to a small group of malicious, narcissistic activists.

This reminds me of the "What is the problem with Apu?" fiasco. No Indian I knew cared, but a small number of sociopathic activists forced the hands of the cowards in charge.

It’s clear as an Asian person you need the insights of white people to determine what you should/shouldn’t be offended about in the depiction of your own race.

As someone with an Asian background, you should go read some of Seuss' newspaper comics where he argues for Japanese internment, and then look at that picture again in that context

That seems like confirmation bias. The book was published before WW2, and the white people in that picture look just as ridiculous and caricatured as the Asian, with dots for eyes and absurd costumes and postures.

I care. Nearly every kid in middle school watched simpsons except me (my parents said it was bad, I had no idea why at the time), and every day I would have to deal with the same Apu jokes and stale imitated accents. At the time, I didn't even know what it was a reference to, and I just took it as kids being kids. But when I grew up, I realized that all that bullshit was pretty much just because of this one character. And I don't want any Indian-American kid to ever have to deal with that stuff again. Its about education and making sure there are real depictions of Indians on screen (not played by other races), not just outright banning media.

> forced the hands of the cowards in charge

So you support a white actor voicing an Indian character, and don't want some Indian-Americans added to the show? Change is good when something is messed up. Our problem wasn't with the show itself, its how the show influences the behavior of society negatively, and the fact that there was simply no other representation of Indian-Americans in media at the time.

The problem here are the bullies, not the show.

South Park, Simpsons, Family Guy and all the greats are packed full of racially-adventurous humour and that's part of what makes these shows great. Scottish, British, Indian, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim and virtually everyone is picked on.

They're equal opportunity offenders.

If you don't like it, that's your prerogative, but don't force your preferences on the rest of us.

I don’t support hank azaria voicing the character, and i believe an indian writer should be deciding what apu says. I’m not saying things should be cancelled, we just want representation. You can make fun of cultures and people, but just recognize when jokes are having a negative impact on their targets in the real world. it’s incredibly disheartening that so many other problematic representations and things like yellowface are being addressed, but apparently nobody cares about this.

> and i believe an indian writer should be deciding what apu says

This seems to belie the entire concept of fiction writing. Must that writer also be a straight married male with children and own a convenience store? Can a male writer write a book with female characters, or vice versa?

https://twitter.com/colbertlateshow/status/98899180972331827...

Hank literally agrees with me. Of course I'm not saying that in general, but in this specific case its absolutely the right thing to do.

I understand Hank as saying there that there ought to be south Asian voices in the writers room, not that they should have complete control over what Apu says.

I don't know what's special about this case. I mean I understand what's of special importance to you, but if writer <-> character matching is required here, I don't see what would prevent it from becoming a universalizable rule that would turn "write what you know" from a piece of hackneyed advice into a moral principle.

Because many prominent Indian-Americans share a similar opinion. Vivek Murthy (previous/future surgeon general), Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, were all in the film and have had similar experiences to mine. Most famous Indian Americans have in fact spoken out about it, and we do care, unlike 'the indians you know' who you implied had the opinion of most of us.

How do you feel about Chabuddy G as a character?

I know dang likes to tell us that Hacker News turning into Reddit is an illusion, but sometimes it really does turn into Reddit. Like this comment, right now.

In the interest of good HN commenting spirit I'll assume good faith on GP and elaborate on my snarky post. I'm sure that many people are tired of comedian's incessant refrain of the importance of "punching up." It's pretentious and tired, but before that the tired phrases were "I just want to make people laugh" and "I make fun of everyone equally." GP's first ethnic group cited were the Scots, so let's go there in the context of North America. Depending on your view, Scottish people are either part of or closely related to the dominant ethnic and racial group. They are not recent immigrants and share language, accent and given names with the majority of the population. By contrast (and especially in the 90s when the Simpsons enjoyed its prime) South Asian immigrants are a visibly different recent minority ethnic group. They have distinct languages, accents and generally don't use western given names for their children. So the Groundskeeper Willie/Scottsman argument is creating a false sense of fairness. To make a tired youth reference, making fun of the grunge kid with the long hair and the weird pale kid with the sweatpants and long fingernails aren't the same thing.

As to why not have whites play Asians even in a cartoon when they can just as easily play space aliens and pink unicorns? The same reason we all hate Big Bang Theory, it leads to tired and insulting jokes based on shallow stereotypes. This is why Asians don't like Apu, because most of the jokes around him are based on lazy and frequently negative stereotypes. The jokes about space aliens and pink unicorns could also be lazy, but there's no space aliens or pink unicorns to get affected by them, fortunately. Remember that Nahasapeemapetilon isn't even a name in any culture, it's made up to sound funny to western audiences.

Nonsense.

Apu is on the whole a very positive stereotype - a successful and responsible small business owner who's respected by his and contributes to his community.

Compare him to someone like Cletus who is a negative stereotype of white Southerners, portrayed as an extremely low IQ ignoramus. Or Kyle's cousin in South Park who's a negative stereotype of a Jew, portrayed as a hypersensitive money-grubber. And so on.

Your injury is nothing more than an imagined grievance.

"This is why Asians don't like"

Speak for yourself. You aren't a spokesperson for South Asians, and not all of them are on the same wokeness bandwagon.

The problem wasn’t Apu or if he was played by a white actor or not, if he didn’t exist the kids would have made fun of you for anything that made you stand out. Skin, what shoes you wore, what you brought home for lunch, do you like a girl, or heaven forbid a boy (back in the day). Kids are vicious.

adults have done it too, including some teachers. people think it’s cool to do because they heard it on the Simpsons. not much stood out, we had uniforms. you get made fun of for the most fundamental and unchanging identity, your race. It absolutely destroyed my self worth at the time, and made me embarrassed of my skin color, and I know that others experienced the same thing.

I had a similar experience in middle school (many “thank you come again” comments), but the conclusion I’ve drawn was that it was due to Apu being the only Indian-American character middle schoolers saw on TV at the time. If there were others (and there are now), the Apu/color-of-my-skin association wouldn’t have been so strong.

I think that's something many people miss in these discussions. Bad/negative/stereotyped portrayals are one thing - those being the only ones is another.

EDIT to ask: how do the Dr. Seuss books fare in that regard?

Another Indian here who is tired of Apu jokes.

I didn't even grow up in America, but it's irritating when your coworkers think that they are meaningfully connecting with you based on what they "learned" from some hackneyed stereotype in a mildly funny adult cartoon. Doubly so when that coworker happens to be in a management position above you.

My advice: if you have a South Asian coworker, put away the Apu jokes unless they like it and bring it up for some reason.

None of the white people are presented in exaggerated, outdated costumes. It exaggerates the slanted eyes, the queue, and (in some editions) the bright yellow color.

Compare it to some of the deliberately-racist cartoons that Giesel drew during World War II:

https://reimaginingmigration.org/dr-seuss-political-cartoons...

This wasn't intended to offend, and I don't know how many people were offended by it. But if I were the publisher the similarities would distress me.

>> None of the white people are presented in exaggerated, outdated costumes

There was a white person presented in an exaggerated, outdated costume in that very same drawing.

The whole image: https://smartcdn.prod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-cont...

But it's all white people getting offended at it, and specifically it's white people who never give a shit about Chinese in any of their other culture wars.

Discriminated against in college admissions? Erased in discussions of diversity in tech? Who cares. Call me back when we can use you to get mad at a children's book.

> None of the white people are presented in exaggerated, outdated costumes.

Outdated? These cartoons were drawn in the 1930's and 40's... 90+ years ago. They were not outdated at the time.

Regardless if we find some of these drawings racist by today's standards - they are historical and should be preserved as such.

1984 becomes more real by the day...

>Outdated? These cartoons were drawn in the 1930's and 40's... 90+ years ago. They were not outdated at the time.

They aged pretty f-ing fantastically considering what they could have drawn back then.

Yes, they were outdated at that time. The Chinese had adopted western dress decades before. The queue was dated long, long before that.

And you know the depicted individual is wearing a queue... how, exactly? There's no hair depicted at all from what I can tell.

As for the wardrobe, no, it doesn't look that dated, especially for the time. Maybe the style of it, but conical hats and wooden shoes are both practical and still commonplace throughout East and Southeast Asia, last I checked. The clogs are probably the most objectionable aspect, and only because I don't know if anything resembling Japanese geta was common in China.

And further, the whole book is from the point of view of a child's imagination, so expecting it to map particularly closely to reality is entirely ignorant of literary context.

Asian with lots of Asian friends in and out of country.

Nobody cares at all.

Well Stephanie and Jaydren in Portland care a lot thank you very much.

And honestly, it's not about that. It's about how Americans present the Chinese to each other. We have a history of abusing minorities, and one of the ways we do that is through presenting demeaning images of them.

I'm sure that actual Chinese people have more to worry about -- though the black people living in America definitely have current fears from people living up to the racist stereotypes presented here. This is about us and dealing with our own difficult past that still afflicts us today.

How out of date was the outfit in the 1930s when the picture was drawn? I don't really know what terms to look up to research that myself so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Anyways, IMO the white character's coloration is just as exaggerated as the Chinese character's. "White" people aren't actually 0xFFFFFF. The white character's physically improbable nose length and hair situation are also reminiscent of racist caricatures of white people.

> "How out of date was the outfit in the 1930s when the picture was drawn?"

It's kind of a stereotype of rural farmers in China. If you do a Google image search for "rural Chinese farmers" or even "Chinese peasants" you can still see the same type of grass hat being worn today. Then remember that in the 1930s the industrial revolution hadn't reached China yet; it was very much an agrarian society (much like the US a century before then) and nearly everybody was a farmer like that.

Is Dr. Seuss's cartoon offensive? Meh, it just feels dated and out of touch with what modern China has achieved, culturally and economically. I personally don't find it any worse a stereotype than what one sees today if they do a Google Image Search for "Texan", "Frenchman", or "Englishman" but YMMV.

(Actually, the GIS result for "Frenchman" is rather amusing; perhaps Google owes France an apology for being "offensive".)

> It's kind of a stereotype of rural farmers in China.

Is it, though? The wardrobe seems a fair bit elegant for some rural farmer; I'd expect a straw hat and simpler garb.

I ain't familiar with Chinese formal wear from that time period, but if I were a child in the 1930's trying to imagine a formally-dressed Chinese man (i.e. the literary context of that depiction) that's probably what I'd imagine. The white rice contributes to that perception of wealth, too; from what I understand, white rice is a symbol of affluence in a lot of Asian cultures, and brown rice a symbol of peasantry (see also: the Imperial Japanese Navy's experience with thiamine deficiency because sailors subsisted themselves entirely on "fancy" white rice instead of brown: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history). The Chinese man's presentation alongside a formally-dressed magician contributes further to that interpretation.

No. The Chinese have a term for these privileged westerners who exhibit faux-outrage: 圣母婊, 聖母婊

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizuo

Why did you copy-paste a related term(Shengmu-Biao ) in both traditional and simplified hanzi?

I'm of Chinese descent. I'm much, more more offended by progressives clamoring to take away educational and job opportunities away from Asians because we're "overrepresented minorities" (as if we hadn't earned our place through hard work and education) and then making a mountain out of a molehill like this to pretend that they are actually concerned about Asians as minorities. Compared to two-facedness of that degree, Dr. Seuss's little cartoon doesn't register at all.

This HN topic in two acts.

[ACT1] Comment here: "What bothers me is the speed with which this process ... happens. We are not discussing things anymore."

[ACT2] jfengel discusses racism. Gets repeatedly downvoted.

Because most people disagree this is racist, but the opinion of the plebs is ignored and the deplatformings happen anyway without having a conversation first. Of course this was going to happen.

Take a look at the images, and you can see why the publishers felt that they were better off without them. As for why eBay decided to glom onto that... that I can't say.

This is the part that bothers me.

Publishers can do whatever they want, and it's nice that they're at least willing to try to be progressive, even if this particular case of outrage is maybe a bit exaggerated.

Ebay jumping on the bandwagon seems like it's just for brownie points with whatever faux-woke nerd happens to scroll past the announcement.

> eBay deciding unilaterally that people can't buy or sell already-printed copies

eBay isn't deciding that, it is deciding unilaterally that it will not participate in the buying or selling of those items.

eBay probably has no interest and in any case has no power to make decisions about what can be bought and sold, only about what it will participate as a facilitator of buying and selling.

Good point! Well I guess I'll just go and buy my copy at the other well known online auction site... what was it called again?

eBay has a natural monopoly due to the nature of auctions. If they decide not to list something, it becomes at the very least much harder to trade.

> Well I guess I’ll just go and buy my copy at the other well known online auction site…

Online auctions aren’t the only places to buy and sell goods.

They aren’t even the only places to buy and sell goods online.

Plenty of places still selling them (though, because of the announcement that they won’t be published, prices are insane right now, as they’ve become instant high-interest speculative collectibles.)

I just bought a bunch of Dr. Seuss books because honestly I’ve never seen them before, never read them as a child, but now I’m deeply curious to find out what is in them

This is splitting hairs. ebay deciding that they don't allow buying/selling is obviously restricted to ... well ebay.

eBay clearly has competitors; you could buy or sell a copy on Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/If-Ran-Zoo-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800...

Amazon is censoring books now too: https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/book-banning-in-an-age-...

My parent's objection was that eBay was a monopoly, and as the only place to buy or sell used books they should face higher scrutiny. I pointed out that Amazon is a serious competitor of theirs; eBay is far from the only place for used book selling.

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