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Originally Posted by hildea
Imagine yourself being a child of mostly Chinese descent, or a parent of Chinese descent reading for your child, and coming across that page. Can you seriously not see why the Seuss rights owners decided to stop reprinting it?
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Hmm... I did ask children of Chinese descent and parents of full Chinese descent. The consensus was that if the book had been published in the 2000's, it would not be acceptable. For when it was published and considering that it was written and illustrated by foreign devils, it served to show the changes in attitudes though the copy being looked at was the 1978 modification minus the queue and bright yellow skin colouring.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
[*]And not quite the same, but related: Every year in December, there's a news story about some primary school somewhere deciding to change the usual Christmas celebrations and decorations to a more generic winter celebration, to accomodate a religious minority. The usual suspects write about Muslims threatening Norwegian culture, the school clarifies that they do this because of some Christian minority which regards a lot of the Norwegian Christmas traditions as heathen, and the noise dies down. Until next year.
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Oddly, here the complaints about Christmas AKA the Winter Holiday are mostly from white parents who could be only be called Christian because their parents occasionally attended church but who suffer from the belief that they are insufficiently sensitive to other cultures. The kids seem to regard Christmas decorations much the same as the decorations for other occasions such as Diwali, Nowruz, Hannukah, Ramadan, El-Hijra, etc.
It's hard to argue that most of the Christmas traditions were not borrowed from earlier religions starting with the Roman Saturnalia moving on to the German-Scandinavian Yule. I tend to find the groups objecting to those as being close to the "if God meant man to eat cooked food, we'd be born with stoves in our throats" group.
Edit: For what it's worth, in Canada, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in July, 2006 formally apologized for the head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885.