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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.
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I think my personality is more determining than my ethnicity.
I don't want to argue whether the books are racist because I haven't yet re-read them, and they shouldn't be suppressed either way. Instead I'll link to someone who makes a good case that you are correct on the racism:
Confront Dr. Seuss’ Racism, Don’t Cancel It: Erasing problematic works as if they never existed won’t prevent stereotyping
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On a practical level, such campaigns to ban or suppress books often do more to popularize a questionable work than blot it out, which is especially true in the Seuss case. Who among us does not thrill to obtaining forbidden literature? . . .
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Maybe that last sentence is more applicable to journalists like Jack Shafer than to typical parents. But, although the word thrill might be too strong, it does describe me.
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Deprived of full access to these memories and context in which the creators worked, we end up expunging the past from the present and forfeiting the lessons that the past, when viewed in full, can teach. Disney’s suppression of Song of the South is softened by the fact that the Internet Archive has preserved a copy of the movie, allowing the independent-minded to point their browsers at it to assess its cruelty firsthand.
Life arrives straight out of the box with rough edges. To paraphrase Seuss, we shouldn’t be so eager to round all of them out. Surely, we’re strong enough to endure the insults of a few pages of vile Seuss. If not, we’re in worse trouble than any of us imagined.
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