Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published. I have three of the Dr. Seuss banned books - If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra and To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street. I always loved the Zebra book, and I got the other two off of eBay a couple of years ago when all this fuss started. The six "problematic" books can't be sold on eBay anymore and were not available on Amazon, either. I checked out the other three that I don't own on You Tube and am scratching my head about McEllicot's Pool, The Cat's Quizzer and Scrambled Eggs Super. McEllicot's Pool has a picture of an Eskimo (I suppose we are not allowed to say that anymore) and a Hispanic person, I think, but I do not consider them derogatory or racist. The Cat's Quizzer has a picture of a supposed Japanese person and another of the Cat eating with chopsticks, but that's about it. I don't know what the problem is with Scrambled Eggs Super, unless it is some people up north dressed in warm clothes. Or could it be objections to the collecting of eggs of non existent rare birds? I did not see anything that would be so repulsive or traumatic to a child as to force the books out of print.
What am I to conclude from this "wokeness?" Do I have to toss the collection of Japanese girls' festival dolls into the trash and replace them with dolls that are move inclusive of other races? They have Asian features... Do I have to change the faces to more nonracial, generic ones? Things are out of hand, folks.
I am also seeing a disturbing journalistic tendency. Stories are circulated with incomplete information. A crime has been committed, but we are not provided with any evidence as to the nature of the crime. The Seuss books are accused of being bad, but the accusers will not clearly state the nature of the accusations. If there are problem pictures, please state the case and point them out clearly. This is different from perpetuating racism. I recently saw another story on Yahoo "News" that stated a racial slur had been written on the car of a person of Asian descent, but in the picture of the damaged car, whatever was written there was blurred out. How are we even to know that a crime was committed at all? We just have to take the so-called journalist's word for it. We are also no longer allowed to know the race of the perpetrator of the crime, even though it is obvious from security films. Why all the fear of presenting the facts for what they are?
The six Seuss books are supposedly guilty of racism, but the whoever is deciding that the books need to be withdrawn needs to clarify the charges being made. It is an incomplete story. I am still seriously looking for racism in these books. I found this in one article. "In The Cat's Quizzer the Japanese character is referred to as a 'Japanese'..." What else is he supposed to be referred to as?? Why is this a problem?? "In 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,' an Asian person is portrayed wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl." Chopsticks and bowls are now racist?? McElligot's contains the word Eskimo, so it's cancelled. I dragged out my copy of On Beyond Zebra, and cannot for the life of me figure out the problem, unless one objects to exotic fellows on camels. I don't.
