Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
The image is an antique representation of a Chinese person with chop sticks. That is how many many Chinese people dressed in the past and the utensils they used. Does the image have some negative connotation in the USA that I am unaware as I do not live in that country?
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This gets into how to interpret Dr. Seuss books. Some of it is here:
https://reason.com/2021/03/08/dr-seu...ks-censorship/
As seen in my link, Geisel/Seuss was an old-fashioned liberal opposed to strong racial and ethnic identification. This is why he portrayed people who looked the part of their race as silly. It is also, I think, one reason why he made the great majority of his characters animals. Indeed, when he was accused of racism, he defended himself on my-characters-are-animals grounds.
Another objection, to the Seuss books, is that when Geisel does have human characters, they are almost always white. I think he did this because he didn't usually like to show racial differences. But it might have been a bigger mistake than one (or is it two?) depictions of a barefoot Black man in a grass skirt.
If he was alive today, he might be saying -- OK, I'll re-draw the few people in those books to make them racially ambiguous. This might be enough to prevent further book suppression, even though the diversity literature professors wouldn't really be satisfied.
None of this, including everything I got wrong above, has anything to do with the freedom, to buy eBooks, that I defend.