Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

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>> severe racist overtones

> I haven't seen a good summary of what parts of the withdrawn books were considered inappropriate, but my understanding is that the stronger objection has been to political cartoons that Theodor Seuss Geisel created.

This is the first link I could find, but I've seen the same content elsewhere: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wr...

Two of the books have traditional racist caricatures of Chinese people, and another one has something that seems like a caricature of an Arabian.

However, the other three are kind of a stretch, IMHO. One has "Eskimo fish" with parka-like manes. Another has a group of people in a boat at the North pole, which are being interpreted as being Inuit, but the text doesn't say so and they just look like people in parkas to me. And the last just has a Japanese person in traditional garb next to the nonsense question "How old do you have to be a Japanese?." I guess the sin is just referencing any non-Western ethnicity in any context, which is kinda nuts.

traditional racist caricatures of Chinese people

Is it racist to depict a citizen of a country in that country’s traditional national garb? Simplified to cartoon form for children?

I guarantee no actual Chinese are offended by this.

Am chinese, am not offended by this. I think it's cute in fact. Yes, N=1 but in general there's a valid point here. It is insane how often people are getting offended on behalf of others nowadays.

> Am chinese, am not offended by this. I think it's cute in fact. Yes, N=1 but in general there's a valid point here. It is insane how often people are getting offended on behalf of others nowadays.

Chinese-born or American-born? My guess is that American-born Chinese would be more likely to be offended, because they've been acculturated to the American culture around this kind of offense, and a lot of it is reasoning by analogy to the black experience (e.g. if similar caricatures of blacks are offensive to them due to centuries of pervasive racism, then other groups should be able to claim offense at caricatures of them)

I remember reading something years ago about an Asian-American frat (I think some pledge died during a hazing ritual). Part of the pledge process was to read a bunch of stuff about anti-Asian racism in order to build a shared identity.

> Chinese-born or American-born? My guess is that American-born Chinese would be more likely to be offended

Born in Europe actually, so I don't know where I fall on that spectrum, haha. But probably closer to the US than to China.

This is what happens when sheltered white people on Twitter get bored.

I've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and also for the trollish username. We've asked you many times to stop the former, and you seem to have ignored my question about the latter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25362566).

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