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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I'm interested in how some people have taken the recent news concerning the foundation's relatively unnewsworthy decision regarding reprinting these 6 works, and have used it to fabricate a story about the Seuss estate being relentless hounded and persecuted into making the decision they did. And of course I'm amazed at how many (and how quickly) people were willing to gobble up the "Now they're banning Dr. Seuss!" lie.
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From the linked 2019 study:
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As critical race scholar-activists, we engaged stakeholders, including youth, families, and teachers from racially marginalized communities, to identify and document existing forms of resistance to Seuss' racist works. In 2017, we submitted this stakeholder feedback, and our study findings, to the National Education Association’s (NEA) Read Across America (RAA) Advisory Committee. RAA is the nation’s largest celebration of reading, with over 45 million annual participants. The NEA created the event in 1996 to take place on Dr. Seuss' birthday (March 2nd). For twenty years, the celebration was centered around Dr. Seuss' children’s books and the author himself. We advocated that they reconsider their twenty year focus on Seuss and use their platform to promote anti-racist diverse books by authors of color. The NEA committed to start transitioning away from Dr. Seuss, change RAA’s theme to “Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers,” and use the event as an opportunity to promote social justice. For the first time in twenty years, they removed all Dr. Seuss books from their annual Read Across America Resource Calendar, and featured all diverse books and authors at their RAA events in 2018.
https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewco...0&context=rdyl
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The article also relates how pressure was put on the Seuss museum in 2017 to remove the image of the Chinese man depicted in the
Mulberry Street book from a mural:
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These edits did not remove the racism; they only modified select parts, while retaining other explicitly racist parts. The revised version came under fire in 2017 when it appeared on a mural at the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum that opened in Springfield, Massachusetts that year. While the edits replaced the word “Chinaman” with “Chinese man,” and removed his bright yellow skin and ponytail, the character retained his chopsticks, bowl of rice, slanted eyes, wooden shoes, and pointed hat. The museum faced pressure to remove their mural featuring this character when children’s book authors Mo Willems, Mike Curato, and Lisa Yee refused to attend a book festival there in October of 2017 because of the “jarring racial stereotype” (Hauser). In a letter to the museum, they stated: “We find this caricature of ‘the Chinaman’ deeply hurtful, and have concerns about children’s exposure to it” (Hauser). Dr. Seuss Enterprises agreed to remove the mural in response to the authors’ boycott, but it did not occur without protest from the Mayor of Springfield and members of Seuss' family, who referred to it as “extreme” and “a lot of hot air over nothing” (Kelly).
https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewco...0&context=rdyl
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