I do understand the urge to say things like "His estate has withdrawn the books. Get over it" because a good proportion of the people complaining and suddenly buying up second hand copies may well be arseholes. I think it's too simplistic to think that if conservatives don't like something it must be a wholly good thing. There is also an urge to mock the idea that this is "cancel culture" (that silly phrase that only blustering conservatives use) because the Seuss Estate
voluntarily made the decision to stop printing the books. I do wonder, though, exactly how voluntary it was and how much influence and pressure was exerted by the unnamed "experts and educators" mentioned in the Seuss Estate's statement. Making a gesture by sacrificing six books to protect your brand against the possible threat of constant accusations of racism isn't exactly a voluntary act. Anyway, I can't stop having a conversation with myself about this so I've come back for one last long think aloud. Whether we call it "cancel culture" or not, six books have effectively been banned. Not quietly allowed to go out of print because they weren't selling (some were and some weren't, though none were among Seuss' big sellers), but because they have very publicly been deemed "harmful and wrong". Voluntarily withdrawing a book to which you own the rights because you are convinced it is causing harm is pretty rare and seems something worth talking about. The only other example I can think of (perhaps people know others) is when Stephen King allowed his novel
Rage to go out of print and convinced his own publishers to pull it. The novel, published in the 70s, is about a high school student who shoots his teacher and takes his classmates hostage. When school shootings increased in the 90s and some perpetrators were found to own the book and one actually mentioned it as an influence, King decided to pull it saying "I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do.”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/...-printed-again
Whether you think King was right, the decision seemed to be one of sincere conscience. Certainly, the causal link between artistic product and potential harm seemed as strong as it ever can be in that case, though this area is always a controversial one. The "morally corrupting" influence of popular culture, especially youth culture, has always traditionally been the province of conservatives and the religious — attempts to ban horror comics, rap, metal and punk music, "blasphemous" films, teen fiction that "promotes" homosexuality etc — and I've always instinctively and philosophically been on the side of the artists, as I'm sure many here have. Restricting culture for moral or ideological reasons is something that should always be taken seriously and I see no reason to take a "get over it" approach just because the instinct to censor is coming from a supposedly left ideology and the people mostly pissed off are conservatives.
The Seuss Estate doesn't actually specify what parts of the withdrawn books are "harmful and wrong" which isn't exactly helpful. But I do wonder exactly how the word "harmful" fits as an accurate and justified definition of some of the images. In
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street the most likely candidate is one illustration of a "Chinese man who eats with sticks" (the image's original yellowish skin tone had already been removed and the words "Chinaman" changed to "Chinese man" in 1978).
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.VxgaK3...id=ImgDet&rs=1
To me, he seems to be presented as an entirely friendly, benign figure. Yes, he in stereotypical traditional costume and yes, he is part of a circus-like parade of 'things seen on Mulberry Street' but in the context of Suess-world
everything is a circus and everything is rendered as an oddity: birds and beasts, staircases and bridges, toppling piles of plates, men with top hats or bowler hats or turbans or giant moustaches or elongated legs. To a child, the world
is a circus and things that are different are interesting. Children's lives are very centred around food — being told what to eat, when to eat, how to eat — and the notion of eating with chopsticks is fascinating to a child who has grown up with a knife and fork. It was to me. I remember being determined to master chopsticks when the McDonnell's first encountered Chinese cuisine. Yes, I realise this means the image "centers whiteness" and yes, it appears quite old-fashioned to modern sensibilities but I question whether presenting cultural difference to a child in a playful way is inherently racist or has anything at all to do with concepts like "harm" or "hate". Of course, one of the ironies of the general complaint that Seuss' world "centers whiteness" is that getting rid of all his books that feature pictures of people from other cultures on the grounds that they are "exoticised" means that the books that remain feature only white people.
The fact that we are talking about children's books rather than adult literature might make things different for some people. But I question the idea that children must necessarily have their literature shorn of any notion that some of it was
written in the past, where people did and thought different things. What reasonable parents, including Chinese ones, reading to their pre-schooler and encountering this image, couldn't simply say
"y'know, this is quite an old book and in the olden days when Dr Seuss wrote this, people in America and Europe used to think it was funny that Chinese people used chopsticks to eat but now we're much more used to different ideas from all around the world, aren't we?" Remember, the Chinese man isn't presented as a villain. He isn't sinister in any way. He is simply there, smiling, using chopsticks and wearing a pointy hat. Children aren't stupid. When I was growing up in the 70s British comic books were full of national and racial stereotypes: French people with onions round their necks, turbaned Indian snake charmers, smiling Chinese people in pointy hats, Australians with corks around their hats, hairy Scots in kilts, Native Americans in feathered headdresses, English toffs in bowler hats and umbrellas. Even at a young age I knew not to associate any of it with the real world and none of the images inspired suspicion or hatred in me. It was the world as a colourful circus. And by the time I moved out of my predominantly white small town and became friends with some people from other cultural backgrounds I can say with some confidence that these cartoonish images had no influence on how I reacted to them and bore no relation to how I viewed them. I realise this is anecdotal and I'm not saying we should go back to relying on these kind of silly stereotypes in current children's literature but I think there has been an overreaction in current efforts to erase the past entirely and to be so full of fear about the idea of playful depictions of "difference".
I think it's quite a leap to make the causal link between the image in
Mulberry Street and a news story about a recent violent attack on an elderly Asian American woman.
McWhorter makes a good case for the images in
On Beyond Zebra (which sounds brilliant btw) also being pretty harmless and Walter (the only person who appears to own the book) seems to concur.
Every case has to be taken on its own merits of course. The other Seuss books may be worse. And something like the rewriting of the Oompa Loompas in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, discussed in the article below seems more justified.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...hildrens-books
Their original presentation as an African tribe being shipped across the ocean to Wonka's factory, a fate they happily accept, could justifiably be called "harmful and wrong". It not only seems to make light of a barbaric period of history, it also has the racist implications that African people were better off as slaves and happily accepted their treatment.
Simply presenting an image of a Chinese person in traditional dress using traditional eating implements doesn't seem the same thing to me and doesn't carry the same weight. I struggle to see what is derogatory or harmful about it.
The Guardian article is interesting. It tries to make a reasonable case for why the Seuss "cancelling" is nothing new (and therefore nothing to worry about unless you're a "conservative talking head"). But all the examples it gives are of books being
slightly rewritten or updated, not withdrawn completely. I wonder why this compromise wasn't possible with the Seuss books with some appropriately subtle minor changes? Would "A Chinese man doing magic tricks" be acceptable if he were dressed in a more contemporary way? It would be easy enough for a talented artist to redraw one image for future editions, surely. Basically, it does seem disproportionate, and a shame, to banish some of these books entirely from existence,
Mulberry Street amongst them -- his first children's book and therefore of some historical literary significance. It seems like a gesture rather than something done to prevent a genuinely perceived potential for "harm".
Finally, given that the Seuss people have concluded that the books do need to be withdrawn, the Guardian article also, in its use of words like "quietly" and "without fanfare" inadvertently highlights another difference between these older examples and the current story. If the books must be withdrawn (rather than updated which seems a reasonable compromise to me) I stick to my original point in my first post of wondering why the big public announcement on Seuss' birthday was necessary. I think there is something in the current climate that seems to require that everything be a performative statement and I don't know if this is the best way to achieve the presumed goals of racial harmony. It seems to only add fuel to the ongoing culture wars which feel terminally divisive and are simultaneously driving us all mad and boring us all to tears.