Sleet, for real... who fucking targeted his books? Nobody. I never heard a single peep about it from anybody up until the estate said that they decided not to publish them anymore. Then, after that, I heard all kinds of people pissed off about their decision. I never heard ANYTHING about anyone being mad at a Dr Seuss book before that... so, again, who was targeting it?
Think about the social media, including sex, violence, anarchy, porn, brainless activities, etc., consumed by youth today, who know little or nothing about the greatness of our Country.
Captain Fantastic on NetFlix recently made such a point about misplaced priorities in our society.
Conservatives were ridiculed for trying to have higher standards for what Hollywood could air on TV or sell as video games.
Footloose made fun of touching, drinking, dancing and convorting.
It is happening again. This time the concern is our youth’s exposure to what the PC culture selectively seems is bad, with an emphasis on tearing down our history. It targets, bullies and if successful banishes. Your timing is off. And it was not just 6 books that were targeted for banishment.
Dr. Seuss decision followed lengthy study of racist themes in his books
By
Lee Brown
March 2, 2021 | 3:18pm
“The decision to
yank six Dr. Seuss books from publication
Tuesday followed years of concerns over racist imagery — including an
academic study that examined the characters in all of his work over 70 years.” Here is the study:
Dr. Seuss books are ‘racist,’ new study says. Should kids still read them?
By
Meghan Collie
Posted
February 28, 2019 2:50 pm EST
The
study, published in the journal for Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, analyzes 50 books and more than 2,200 characters created by Dr. Seuss. Of those characters, only 45 are of colour. “The presence of anti-blackness, Orientalism and white supremacy span across Seuss’
entire literary collection and career,” say researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens.
Ishizuka and Stephens collected several instances of Seuss’ racism to illustrate their point. For example, in the original version of the story And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street, a Chinese man is drawn “with chopsticks and a bowl of rice in his hands, bright yellow skin, slanted eyes, a long black braid, and a conical hat,” write the researchers.
In the book If I Ran the Zoo, a white man says he would “put a person of colour wearing a turban” on display. Ishizuka and Stephens call this is an act of “dehumanization,” which is “to treat someone as though he or she is not human. Researchers also suggest that Dr. Seuss only ever wrote about two human black characters, and both are depicted as monkeys.
From 1941 to 1943, Dr. Seuss — born Theodor Seuss Geisel — worked as the chief political cartoonist for a New York newspaper called PM. During his tenure, Seuss published more than
400 cartoons, nearly all of which were about the Second World War. Most of his drawings took aim at people like Hitler and Mussolini, and ideologies such as anti-Semitism. However, Seuss also created several racist cartoons about black and Japanese people.
The internment of Japanese Americans began shortly after Seuss’s cartoons were published. It’s widely believed that Seuss tried to make amends for
his racism towards Japanese people in later stories, such as Horton Hears a Who. Researchers say the treatment of non-white characters in Dr. Seuss stories encourages “the development and reinforcement of racial bias in young children.”
Carl James, an education professor at York University, agrees. “[Literature] has an impact and an influence on the early development of self, the understanding of self, how children come to know themselves and […] their potential,” says James. “Therefore, we need to pay attention to the [way] literature conveys messages.”
For James,
banning problematic literature from the curriculum should always be a possibility. “We have to think [about] when it was considered a classic,” says James. “What was the political, social and economic context at that time? And what has changed since then that we have now become aware?” It’s crucial that the stories our children learn progress as society does, according to James.
“It’s not to say that some of those classics cannot be looked at. It’s also [asking ourselves], ‘What is the critical lens we’re going to use to interpret that?'” James says. “We need to give kids the lens to critique the work.” James says it’s
paramount that kids are taught that those controversial stories don’t “undermine their potential or their abilities or their sense of being or their sense of belonging.”
“
We can’t leave these [stories] to chance, and we can’t simply ignore differences… We must always be taking these [differences] into account and revisiting the Canadian content [accordingly].” Random House Children’s Books
announced Thursday that Dr. Seuss’s Horse Museum will be released on Sept. 3. The book is based on an unfinished manuscript by the late Dr. Seuss.
Identity politics and PC culture (IMO) is far more harmful and divisive than Dr. Seuss. We can be better people and teach liberty and equality without selective outrage and tearing down history. Propaganda was a big part of WWII. Immigrants have been profiled since before this country was born. We can do better without modern-age book burning.
If the concern is truly about our youth, then stand against
today’s crap being fed to our kids on social media. The high rate of depression, drug abuse, suicide among youth isn’t Dr. Seuss’ fault. Plenty of children’s books have been written since Dr. Seuss. It’s not as if Dr. Seuss is required reading to graduate from kindergarten. But propaganda like
White Fragility is now curriculum.
If the concern is really about diversity, then walk the walk. Promote
all minority and women voices, not just the ones that belong to a favored group. Competition for political voices is what makes democracy work, not team politics.