Even absent any controversy about racially insensitive artwork (I mean seriously: there are africans drawn as half-monkeys and a chinese man whose eyes are slanted lines! This is not stuff modern kids should be presented with), these definitely aren't "classics".
But as far as a place to find them for adults who want to read them, that will curate them for posterity: have you tried the library?
Yeah, and black people commonly use the N-word among themselves too. That doesn't mean it isn't offensive for me to use it.
What if the character is laughing and their eyes are virtually shut? Sorry, Ray, you need to draw the eyes, I can’t. Ok, now I can draw the hair.
You have to take into consideration history and changing sentiments when looking at these things.
For example, a white man overly emphasizing asian-ness to an extent that it caricatures them and makes them a one-dimensional "other" is MUCH different than an asian culture portraying themselves this way in a better context.
Same with words like the b-word... a man using this word towards a woman is (usually) incredibly offensive. A woman using this word towards another woman CAN be endearing in the right context, or used to cut her down.
Words and depictions of people are HIGHLY context sensitive!
In "Tropic Thunder" (2008) Robert Downey Jr. famously wore blackface. Of course I doubt he could do it today, but is that because it would be genuinely offensive, too controversial or both?
They were using blackface as a way to talk about race issues rather than the offensive way it has been used in other contexts.
Whether or not that kind of thing would fly today is a different question. I certainly hope that people could look at things holistically and not just have a knee-jerk reaction to something like this. I'm also interested in what black people think about this, because ultimately that's what matters most.
Although it is a bit ironic to see so many saviors valiantly offended. The entire SJW thing is more alienating than run of the mill, day to day racism. The gymnastics people pull off are astounding. Next they claim they're doing it on my behalf. Perhaps they'll call me a racist for disagreeing online. Those looking to be offended will always find a way. At a certain point we have to stop indulging them.
Dr. Seuss had some offensive cartoons in his early days, but I don't see that as illustrative of his entire character. I don't recall being offended as a child.
A lot of music is misogynistic and violent, same as old movies, books and so on. Sure, don’t frivolously add to it to cause pain, but don’t ban things that are today anachronistic but when produced were uncontroversial.
Let’s say hypothetically the Great Wall of China was built by prisoners of war, slaves and other spoils of war. Do we then not visit them? Are they denounced?
One source among many: https://www.history.com/news/when-dr-seuss-went-to-war
It’s not like they were known for being chivalrous (Bataan).
There's a distinction here between demonizing the enemy you're fighting against and demonizing the citizens of your own country for having a particular national origin. The cartoon here implies that Japanese-Americans (depicted the same way as the Japanese emperor in other cartoons) are traitors. And Dr. Seuss was German-American himself and did not try to imply through his cartoons that German-Americans or Italian-Americans are traitors.
As it regards “murder”. I think people get overly excited about nuclear bombs. We Capet bombed Germany and Japan. Japan carpet bombed China. Germany sent over their V1 & V2s. Many more of your ‘civilians’ died in the carpet bombing campaigns. You also forget that in Japan the Emperor was a cult-like hero. The majority would have walked over a cliff for him. It wasn’t a bunch of innocents we were fighting in either theater.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...
Japanese internment isn't considered problematic because it led to Japanese nationals that were supporting the Japanese war efforts being interned. It's problematic because it was indiscriminate and race-based - nearly all Japanese Americans in the continental US ended in internment camps. There's no comparison here - Japanese Americans were treated substantially worse than even German nationals, actual citizens of the country the US was at war with.
> You also forget that in Japan the Emperor was a cult-like hero. The majority would have walked over a cliff for him.
I'm struggling to find a charitable interpretation for this. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that it's okay to consider Americans of national origin X traitors if the US is at war with X and the country X happens to be led by a cult-like hero?
I wonder if _some_ may feel guilt for their own past actions or a historical burden unfairly hefted upon them. Instead of approaching that, it _may_ be easier to externalize and blame others. This _could_ explain the rampant accusations of racism. It is easy to see how this could become a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
It’s like how white people think they invented colorism, even though the preference for fairer skin in women exists throughout the pre-colonial historical record in India, Africa, and Asia. (As a dark skinned person whose half white daughter came out darker than him, I applaud the trend away from fairer skin as a beauty standard! But white people thinking they invented the beauty standard to begin with is self-centered and paternalistic: https://quillette.com/2019/02/13/the-origins-of-colourism/ We had colorism in India long before white people.)
In India that meant dark skinned Dravidian natives were ruled by the light skinned upper classes or castes. As a result of minimal intermarriage, these Central Asian genes are found mostly in “groups of priestly status”, ie, Brahmins. This led to the standard of beauty becoming ingrained.
There’s other factors as well, in that it’s a status symbol for some families to make their women stay at home rather than work. Not having to work in the fields means you don’t get tanned, making such people appear more beautiful by this standard.
Side note, I’d like to apologise to the Indians who believe that they’re the original inhabitants of the country and that “others” (ie, Muslims) are “invaders”. However, notwithstanding your hurt feelings, you still gotta face facts.
Source - A new study squelches a treasured theory about Indians’ origins. The Aryans did not come from India; they conquered it (https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/04/05/a-new-study-squelc...)
People act like Indians had this authentic indigenous culture before British colonization, overlooking that it’s the synthesis of wave after wave of colonization over millennium. I spoke English, even before coming to America, because of British colonialism. But I’ve got a Hebrew last name because Muslims colonized India before the British and brought it over from the Middle East. The food I grew up eating is a product of those same Muslim invaders, plus ingredients (chili peppers) sourced from Europeans who got them from the Americas. If you removed the layers of colonization from the culture I’m not sure what you’d have left.
The British, of course, are themselves the result of wave after wave of colonization to the British isles. If you peeled away the influences of the Norman colonizers, the Saxons, the Romans, the Vikings, etc., what would be left?
Japanese used to have a stigma related to being tanned as it represented manual labor. Not being tanned meant you didn’t work like a peasant. In western society oddly being tanned was associated with having leisure time to tan. All in all ‘not tanning’ was all around better than foot binding as a status marker.
Now, in Japan you see two situations people who want to look untanned and others who want to look ultra tanned (really dark make up).
I’m sure this will make these ultra sensitive types go into a tailspin.
Now in South Asia there is a tendency for middle class women to lighten their skin tone. Is that good, bad? I dunno. That should be up to them. To me it’s no different from other make up or getting hair transplants or nosejobs or other cosmetic surgery. But some people want to jam their preconception on other people’s freedoms.
White people engage in other forms of plastic surgery because various media has told them a certain form is the most beautiful. The difference here is that Western media has clearly spent over a century villianizing certain with Asian traits.
Wonder if Classical Japanese art like this[1] will get banned?
Interestingly lots of Manga and Anime go the other way and give people vertical eye shapes (buggs bunny eyes).
[1] https://spokenvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Utamaro-...
I do see woodcuts using the same eye rendering for demons and other underworld characters, but I hope those don’t get banned by a foreign culture because it thinks it misrepresents its own people.
At this point people are on a veritable ‘witch-hunt’ looking for their witches and waiting for Bradburys Firemen to come burn them.
Those woodcuts you are referring to have a much different context. There's a big difference between a white man caracituring based on race and an asian culture using this depiction on their own terms.
And I don’t think things can only be described by people on their own terms. If it were the case then only descendants of imperialists (Japanese in Asia, Britons in India and America, etc) could talk about the aftermath. And only Africans can talk about things Africans and only Mexicans about Mexico, etc. That’s untenable.
I respect your difference in opinion. I'm interested in how asian / black people feel about these Dr. Seuss books.
> And only Africans can talk about things Africans and only Mexicans about Mexico, etc. That’s untenable
I really don't think anybody is suggesting that
Which Asian and Black people? Inevitably, it seems like it’s some professor of ethnic studies that are consulted about these questions. (That’s actually exactly what happened here to decide on what Dr. Seuss books were racist.) But think about that for a moment. Do you think the opinions of a random white Columbia University social sciences professor are a fair gauge of “how white people feel” about some issue? Obviously not. Then why would you assume the same is true as to people of color?
As a person of color I am vigorously opposed to this trend of putting professors and activists in charge of speaking for people of color. It’s totally distorting the conversation we are having with the rest of America, and also amongst ourselves. My mom and aunts, immigrants from Muslim countries, fret over their kids being exposed to western moral values (divorce, premarital sex, disrespect for elders, aggressive individualism, etc.) I have never heard them complain about some depiction in some book or movie. Meanwhile, professors and activists are making a huge deal about pictures and depictions in our name. But they are simultaneously working with white social progressives to undermine things that typical people in these communities care a lot more about. It’s perverse.
How are you just ignoring his WWII career as a propaganda artist? I linked you one of the tamer examples, but he was creating cartoons depicting both Japanese and Germans as the evil enemy.
He was making anti-Japan propaganda, there's no doubt he made them into evil characters.
Proof
http://keyeventsofworldwar2.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/4/19640...
If that's how you view war propaganda, clearly nearly a century after the war things influenced by such propaganda should not be exposed to young children.
Even "bad guys" can be good characters [0], the most complex/nuanced characters are also complex. Start dictating that <x> characters can't have negative attributes, and you end up with boring, simplistic caricatures of <x> thrown in as tokens, but never managing the highlight (because why would you want boring, restricted characters to be in central roles?).
[0]: Is Gregory House a good character? Is "Dexter"? What about characters from the shield, or breaking bad?
As for common, the estimates I can find show between 1/5th and 1/3rd of South Korean woman receive double eyelid surgery.
The kind of ridiculous physical caricature we see in this kind of artwork (slanted eyes and buck teeth on asians, long arms, huge lips and a completely non-representative chimpanzee circle around the mouth on africans, etc...) only makes sense when viewed from outside, in the "look at these strange and alien people" sense. No one drawing themself reaches for tropes like this.
Chinese: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
Korean: https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2007/05/25/2007052...
Japanese: https://www.irasutoya.com/2018/06/blog-post_724.html
Among other genres.
Maybe your mental model of people drawing themselves with "slanted eye representation" is more specific in nature?
I haven't seen the other tropes you've mentioned though.
It doesn't strike you as odd that in this whole enormous controversy which has consumed right wing media all week and driven this thousand+ comment thread to the top of HN...
... that no one thought to show you the actual artwork in question, and that you never looked it up for yourself?
Seriously, it's pretty bad. Go look.
My prior comment was in response to this gap.
With regards to the controversy stirred up by right-wing propaganda, Aesop's fable of the bull and the gnat applies for me.
Peace.
I’m looking forward to Banned Book Week this year. It’s always interesting to see what small percentage of people are serious about their principles.
If you were a Librarian and the Washington Post called to ask you whether you were going to keep circulating the books that everybody-even-the-publisher has acknowledged are racist, don’t you think you might interpret that as pressure to pull them? How about if Karen comes in and holds one of them in front of your face from the shelf and starts loudly demanding that racism not be allowed in your community any longer. Do you honestly think that won’t/hasn’t happened?
https://news.yahoo.com/connecticut-librarians-praise-decisio...
I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion. And why would a LGBTQ bookstore sell LGBTQ hate propaganda?
I guess this could be taken to an extreme. Maybe a library in a highly conservative town chooses to not stock anything that has a hint of left-wing ideology, and maybe they have internet filters to block any left-wing web sites, and they only put front-and-center highly right-wing books.
I don't know, it's complicated.
The truth is, there is already plenty interference is private business, but it (seems) to not be evenly applied. If I request a library stock (or borrow) a book that I'd like to read, I don't consider political aesthetics to be a valid reason to refuse.
> I'm sure there are plenty of Christian book stores / libraries out there who are unwilling to stock The God Delusion
Do you mean a normal bookstore owned by Christians, or a specialist bookstore that only stocks christian literature? If the store could refuse any non-christian material (e.g. a cookbook) as well as Dawkins books, I'm not sure if that's censorship - a greengrocer can also refuse to stock The God Delusion on similarly reasonable grounds.
I think we've decided as a society that sexual orientation is a protected group. You cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation. But I think you can still discriminate based on views of what is racist and what is not? If a white guy walks into black-owned barber shop and throws around racial slurs at the barbers, can the owners of that barber shop refuse him service and kick him out? I certainly hope so... but am I being hypocritical?
Honestly I'm out of my depth here. I have opinions but I don't think my opinions are necessarily as informed as I want them to be.
What kind of example is this? Does it matter what the respective races are? How is this equivalent to the wedding-cake example?
As for "sexual orientation is a protected group"; religion is also protected.
But for the rest of it, I get what you’re saying. I definitely want to live in a world where there are Christian booksellers selling their curated collections, and left wing revolutionary bookstores selling theirs. That only adds to diversity of expression. On the other hand, if I started to see large numbers of previously neutral purveyors of books saying they wouldn’t carry anything that offends the church I’d criticize that. I don’t want to live under a new puritanism, even if everybody forwarding it is entirely within their rights to do so.
Doesn't the fact that there are more books in existence than any library can possibly stock forces them to pick and choose what gets onto shelves? That filter process cannot be divorced from people's values and baises unless we went with some sort of random selection of all texts that have ever existed, which would result in complete nonsense. We pick winners and losers all the time and not everybody is going to agree with those choices.
I guess I don't see it as unreasonable for a library to not want to stock what they view as racially insensitive books, especially kids books. But of course, people are going to disagree with exactly what that means. Maybe somebody out there truly thinks Green Eggs & Ham shouldn't be stocked because it glorifies exploiting animals for their meat and eggs. There's just no pleasing everybody I guess
Maybe we’ll get there. In my lifetime censors have been mostly concerned with childrens’ books with supernatural themes and more recently lgbt stories. I’d guess that’s still where most of the library “book banning” is focused.
Yet.
And it's tiresome and boring to hear people pretend that any reasonable line will be drawn. History is full of racially "insensitive" things. What, are we going to make sure "modern kids" don't see that stuff too? What a nullified and pretentious existence.
>have you tried the library?
I have, and it turns out that the same people who think banning books is fine also run the library. Oh the irony!
Isn't that also true of violence in games and movies?
Or any morally repugnant behaviour, now that we mention it?
In fact, why let them read anything except the Bible?
We all grew up with those bugs bunny cartoons with the same depictions, some even going so far as to depict them as cannibals, and I can't say either of those made our generation really think that of either of those ethnic groups. I think it was a realistic trope that 90s kids usually watched cartoons in groups after school with every ethnic group, that Sunny Delight commercial comes to mind [0], as does Dave Chapelle's joke about purple drink.
People need to realize that the World is messy, and racism and prejudice exits in all walks of life: none greater than in social class, which transcends ethnicity. And the sooner children realize that the sooner they will be able to acknowledge it and develop a sense of agency in the World to deal with an imperfect World.
Instead, all this re-enforces is a helicopter parents 'Karen' antics on to their children in which complaining to no end is the only way to get one's point of view, that ultimately drives to discord in Society: be it person or on social media--with the latter being critical to sustaining it's way over-valuations which mask their Black Mirroresque business models which that often provoke this type of behaviour and should really be the focus here and not canceling Dr. Suess books.
Sidenote: I'm sure their is some SJW interpretation for canceling Sunny Delight to be made about this as well as the kid was 'accosted only after a white aggressor perpetuated violence which provoked the black one to do the same' type narrative, but either way it's just best to ignore them.
Some parents are totally clueless.
This is like expecting that children would develop phobia to birds after playing angry birds (have you seen this very obvious slanted eyebrows in the main character?).
A figure with slanted eyes pose the same danger currently as giving your son a tin toy with sharp angles. Could cut their skin if one single child in the planet would find that stuff remotely funny, or accept to play with it for money.
This old fart WWII bomb has been inactivated long time ago. Just can't compete the thousands of positive asian characters that are the bread and butter in the journey of the western child. Unlike 1945 farmers, the pokemon generation are very aware of anything remotely related with japanese culture. Can talk for hours about their favourite asian characters, specially the evil ones, that they absolutely adore.
My wife and I help guide the convo and but they draw their own conclusions. Critical thinking is a muscle which must be exercised and grown.
I find as a parent that I sometimes lump in my younger one with my older one and unfairly (to the younger) compare them to each other, even though the older one is just so much more developed. This sometimes ends up with me putting too high of expectations on the younger one unintentionally, and she feels inadequate.
Not trying to get all advicey here, but I know I have a hard time addressing each child at their own age and level, and while maybe the 4 year old appears to be keeping up, a 4 year olds’ brain is just not as developed as a 13 year old.
Don't outsource your tesponsibility to help guide the next generation. Don't shelter them from your idea of obcenity either. If you respect their capabilities; you let them set their boundaries on their own.
I swear this wokeness movement is getting so tone deaf they don't realize they're becoming the radical pearl clutchers that the actual Liberal's fought against the auspices of to make sure that knowledge was shared.
When you're in stark opposition to the cause of a bunch of Librarians, you're almost certainly in the wrong.
Yes, they do! I was explaining just this to my kids yesterday, in the context of this very controversy. I don't understand why you think I should have read them those particular books to them when they were toddlers. Seriously, that stuff is pretty vile.
https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=dr+seuss&sin=