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Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss’ racial ideology doesn’t seem all that crazy for a white man born in 1904. He held some pretty horrible views and then he changed some of them over time. I don’t know why we shouldn’t respect the wishes of those who’s survived him to take a few books out of publication.

Would you want to be remembered for the most racist stuff you've done? Probably not. Dr. Seuss' people feel the same way, so they're not publishing it. I don't see the controversy over this.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2230928...i-ran-the-zoo-mulberry-street-mcgelliots-pool

[h=3]Some of Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons were unabashedly liberal and ahead of their time. Others were wildly racist.[/h] Dr. Seuss’s work for adults includes some pretty unambiguously racist images. Husband-and-wife team Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, who run the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, developed a study of Dr. Seuss’s history of racism that features a small sampling.
One ad Dr. Seuss drew for Flit insecticide featured a disgusted white woman saying to a Black man, “You hold a job, Worthless? Say, ni**er, when you hold a job a week, mosquitos will brush their teeth with Flit and like it!’” Dr. Seuss tended to draw Black people as cannibals or monkeys, and they weren’t the only racial group he caricatured.

Beginning well before the lead-up to World War II, Dr. Seuss frequently drew Japanese people with animalistic features who were violent threats to America, referred to them as “Japs,” and captioned them with jokey lines that replaced their Rs with Ls. “Velly Scary Jap-in-the-Box,” reads the caption for one cartoon of a Japanese man crawling out of a box labeled “JAP WAR THREAT.” He also drew caricatures of Jewish people with oversize noses causing chaos everywhere they went by demanding lower prices.
Notably, Dr. Seuss also drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws, the policies of Nazi Germany, and American isolationism. Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons, Maus author Art Spiegelman writes in the foreword to the 1999 book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period.” In fact, Dr. Seuss, Spiegelman argues, drew “virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and Black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism.”I

Dr. Seuss was on the right side of history in many ways — and he also drew a lot of really virulently racist stuff. That’s his legacy as a cartoonist.

Humans are complicated, so many of us have complicated legacies. It makes sense for people to want to deemphasize the negative and emphasize the positive of someone's life.

[h=3]There are very few characters of color in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. The ones that do appear are racist caricatures.[/h] There aren’t that many racial caricatures in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, mostly because there aren’t that many nonwhite characters in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens counted 45 characters of color among the 2,240 human characters who appear in Dr. Seuss’s 50 books, which works out to just 2 percent. Notably, all of those characters are male. There are no girls or women of color in the Dr. Seuss canon.

And when characters of color do appear in these books, they appear as racial caricatures. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens found that all 45 characters of color were either subservient, exotified, dehumanized, or some combination of the three. Dr. Seuss’s characters of color drive carriages for whip-wielding white characters, dress in turbans and “rice paddy hats,” and never speak out loud. Most of them are Orientalist caricatures, and the two that aren’t are those African characters drawn as monkeys in If I Ran the Zoo.

The Whos in Whoville are just fine. This is not:



So yeah, I'm pissed to see people defending this and hiding behind "cancel culture."
 
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Maybe they don’t want to invest in re illustrating books that no one cares about. Or, maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the original racist versions by reillustrating.
 
Maybe they don’t want to invest in re illustrating books that no one cares about. Or, maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the original racist versions by reillustrating.

Or maybe they had a bunch of copies sitting around not selling and they figured out how to move em
 
I started this thread to get what others thought of the accusations of Seuss being a racist. Problem?
And yes, I can get behind re-illustrating any offensive pages.

Can anyone photoshop a smaller nose onto this one cartoon? Asking for a friend.
 
 
looks like Jeep is having some sluggish sales

 
Finger pointing is never the answer, especially when you do no know one’s character. We are all educated adults here Ph and none of us (ok, maybe there are exceptions) condone racist caricatures. But wouldn’t it be preferable that Seuss’s Publishers just alter the images without ceasing the publications of the books? In my opinion they damaged the reputation of a man and his works that as his daughters has said (while insisting her Dad didn’t have a racist bone in his body) were truly unique.

Considering that only one of these books has any level of current popularity (if I Ran the Zoo) and the best lines and bits of that book have already been repurposed in the book Circus McGurkus, I am guessing there was a business decision here: 'We'll suffer no loss in sales if we go a head and discontinue production of these racist books that basically no one buys anyway, and Gen Z will think we are woke and progressive.' They see the coming tide of Generation Z as the next big wave of baby makers and Generation Z, on average, has very little tolerance for racism, sexism and transphobia. Moves like this, an essentially symbolic moves to eliminate a non-selling racist book from their catalog, are smart business decisions.
 
Or maybe they had a bunch of copies sitting around not selling and they figured out how to move em

That would be brilliant. So many rubes ready to be outraged and stick it to the lubes by giving their money away. I imagine Sailor's copies are on the way.
 
Its like the Trump, do not read the book __________ by _________, its classified stuff and we are filing a lawsuit, also its all fake news. Pre sales of book ________ by _______ have hit record numbers as ________ by ________ is poised to be a best seller.
 
gets me thinking about when NBA players refused to work and the action was widely labeled as a "boycott" instead of a strike

seems that in general Americans dramatically overestimate the political power behind one's refusal/advocacy to mass consume and are wildly uncritical of how "cancel culture" discourse might actually strengthen corporate power over the average citizen
 
The main reason is a strike is labor acting against management. Over the past few years, NBA management from team level to NBA offices supported the players not playing and joined with players in their political actions and statements.

Management and labor were on the same side. I can't think of any major "strike" where labor and management agreed on the issues and the actions.
 
Management did not want players to walk off the court and refuse to play a game. Come the fuck on rj.
 
The owner of Bucks worked with them from the start of that walkout. To say otherwise is deny what happened.

The league then stood by the players. At no point did the owners demand the players go back to work against their will and supported player initiatives about those issues going forward. Again to say otherwise is to change history.

I completely understand that if I post today is Thursday that you have become genetically predisposed to deny that and try to diminish me. It's such a sad, transparent waste of energy.
 
The owner of the Bucks frantically texted the Wisconsin AG to get him to talk to the players so they would agree to play the next day.

Management tolerated the walkout and did not make a stink for PR reasons but they do not want the players to walk off the court. To think that would be completely idiotic.
 
Four minutes after tweeting that endorsement of their stoppage, Lasry sent a text to a member of Kaul’s staff (the records don’t specify whom) to profusely apologize for news of the potential meeting with Kaul being leaked by players to The Athletic’s Shams Charania. “Jon Horst [the Bucks’ general manager] and I just yelled at the players. This was unacceptable … That was not ok by our players to leak that,” Lasry wrote after sending a screenshot of Charania’s tweet.

Sounds like a real supportive guy.

https://defector.com/33-year-old-bucks-exec-alex-lasry-wants-to-be-a-senator-now/
 
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