[Julie Steiner]

Actually, Birth of a Nation and Mein Kampf also violate eBay's policies. And encountering those Seuss depictions as an adult, within the context of decades of interactions with people of other races and cultures, is not as all the same thing as encountering them as an impressionable kindergartener.

Martin, you and John McWhorter seem to be saying that "the Elect" just want to usurp the power to make new rules that other people have to obey.

Who are these "Elect"? Asian Americans and their allies, who have no right to be killjoys and object to the presentation to children of harmless stereotypes? Has the continued normalization of the longstanding attitude that Asians are ridiculous foreigners who don't really belong in American society been harmless lately?

Are you aware that harassment and outright attacks directed against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is a real phenomenon? Especially recently? Perhaps you don't think that Trump encouraged anti-Asian attitudes in his followers precisely because he knew he could easily build on foundations that had already been well-laid long ago. But I do.

Does the woman quoted below sound like "the Elect" when she objects to depictions in Seuss's books that are uncomfortably reminiscent of this one, which was published on Feb 13, 1942--just six days before President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 and incarcerated tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent?



The 1937 image from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is too big to display nicely here for comparison, so here's a link to it: https://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/rockc...i t-2000w.jpg

Though Seuss’ art has been around for decades — “Mulberry Street,” his first children’s book, was published more than 80 years ago — widespread criticism of his work is relatively recent. Karen Ishizuka, chief curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, said Dr. Seuss' books have been able to get away with this racism for so long in part because of the persistence of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. since the 1800s.

“No doubt, the long-standing prevalence of racist Asian imagery within the larger widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. added to the delayed response to Dr. Seuss’ racism,” Ishizuka told NBC Asian America. “Generations of Americans have grown up with depictions of Asians that ranged from grotesque to comical. Especially when buffered in Seuss’ rhyming verse, his racist depictions, already normalized in U.S. society, are put forth in jest as if they are innocuous.”

Dr. Seuss eventually edited the image from “Mulberry Street” in 1978, more than 40 years after it was first published, by removing the yellow pigment from the Asian man’s skin as well as the pigtail, and changing “Chinaman” to “Chinese man.” But the character’s slanted eyes remained.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-a...m-long-rcna381

The revised image was still problematical. He's still depicted as a circus freak, just like the man on the facing page, who has a "ten-foot beard / That needs a comb." The clear message: being Chinese makes someone an oddity to be gawked at for the entertainment of "normal" (i.e., White) Americans.

In 2017, three well-known authors of children's books criticized the amended portrayal's inclusion in a mural in a Seuss-themed museum:

The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Springfield on Tuesday unveiled its redesigned mural, months after its previous mural, which was revealed on the museum’s inauguration, was criticized as reinforcing racial stereotypes.

The museum also installed a wall label, “Dr. Seuss in Historical Context,” which explains the evolution of the racial attitudes of the children’s book author, a Springfield native whose real name was Ted Geisel.

The museum had its grand opening in July. The first-floor indoor mural at that time featured characters from Seuss’ first book, “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” which was published in 1937. One of the characters was a Chinese man with slit eyes, wearing a pointy hat and holding chopsticks.

Kids’ book authors Mo Willems, Mike Curato and Lisa Yee protested. “We find this caricature of ‘The Chinaman’ deeply hurtful, and have concerns about children’s exposure to it,” Willems wrote in a letter posted on Twitter and signed by all three. “While this image may have been considered amusing to some when it was published 80 years ago, it is obviously offensive in 2017.” Yee and Curato are Asian American.

Willems, Yee and Curato withdrew their participation in the museum’s Children’s Literature Festival, which had been scheduled for October. The museum later canceled the festival.

[...]

The new mural, installed on top of the old mural, includes characters from “Mulberry Street,” as well as more than a dozen other Seuss stories. A museum statement called the new painting “a celebration of Dr. Seuss’s wonderful journey starting on Mulberry Street and ending with ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go’.”

Beyond that statement, museum officials would not comment.

The new wall text describes Geisel’s childhood surrounded by immigrants: “Ted’s visual world was steeped in what some might now consider racially charged imagery.” It describes unnamed racial characters as exemplifying “images that were common in illustration as short-hand for ethnicity.” The wall text further explains that “The Sneetches,” written in 1961, was a parable about human dignity, which used birdlike creatures instead of people and was beloved by President Barack Obama.

“Does the fact that Dr. Seuss changed over time make it OK that his early imagery in children’s books is no longer comfortable for readers?” the text asks. “We hope all who visit will strive to see Dr. Seuss in historical context and celebrate the fact that a person can change and grow over time.”

https://www.baltimoresun.com/hc-fea-...outputType=amp

The letter on Twitter has since been taken down. It would not surprise me if it was taken down as part of the agreement to revise the mural. I did find sections of the letter quoted or paraphrased in a few news accounts:

In their statement, the authors said they had privately appealed to have the mural taken down, or for the museum to “provide context” for the image, which shows a Chinese man with chopsticks in his hands, slits for eyes, and a pointed hat. Otherwise, they wrote, “[d]isplaying imagery this offensive damages not only Asian American children, but also non-Asian kids who absorb this caricature and could associate it with all Asians or their Asian neighbors and classmates.”

When their requests were denied, Curato, Willems, and Yee announced that they were backing out of the festival, which was slated for October 14.

In protesting the mural, the authors sought to draw a distinction between the painting and the author, noting that “the career of Ted Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, is a story of growth, from accepting the baser racial stereotypes of the times in his early career, to challenging those divisive impulses with work that delighted his readers and changed the times.”

With the image displayed as a standalone, however, they wrote that the museum was undermining the story of Geisel’s transformation by leaving small children to interpret it for themselves. “While this image may have been considered amusing to some when it was published 80 years ago,” they concluded, “it is obviously offensive in 2017 (the year the mural was painted).”

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...uss-mural.html

I find the three authors' objection to that image's inclusion in the mural to be pretty nuanced, not a knee-jerk reaction from cancel culture.

BTW, the decision to stop publishing these six titles was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises (a private business), not the Dr. Seuss Foundation (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation).