This past week, 6 books written by beloved children books author, Dr. Seuss got cancelled. The publishing organization that is in charge of the sale of Dr. Seuss books and keeping up the legacy of Dr. Seuss has stopped printing these books, and Amazon has taken down these books from their site. Additionally, after these books were selling for thousands on eBay, eBay has also taken down all sales of these books. According to NBC, these books were taken down for their “racist Asian imagery”, with one book portraying an Asian man holding chopsticks and saying “a Chinaman who eats with sticks” and another portraying barefoot asian men carrying a bamboo cage with a white man carry a gun on top of the cage, and describing the picture saying “I’ll hunt in the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant / With helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant.”
To me, there are a few questions that I ask myself when thinking about whether or not there is justification in taking these books down (I am talking about moral justification not legal justification), and I will take this blog to just go over one of these questions.
Should a book not be sold because of racist or offensive imagery?
I think that the answer to this is that companies should decide which books to sell based on which books people are buying, and should not try to control the market by banning the selling of a certain book because of moral objections. Why should a company be in charge of the moral standard of a society. Additionally, even if the book is truly racist and expresses evil ideas, censorship of the book only makes us forget about why these ideas were so evil. In other words, I don’t think that censorship is the right tool to combat racism. The tool that works best to combat racism is more speech not less. People need to explain why they believe that something is racist and let others decide for themselves instead of just taking down the speech that they think is racist. This idea is exactly why we study history, no matter how evil our history is. We need to know everything about our past so we can come to a conclusion about what was wrong with it in order for us not to repeat it. If we just took down all of the evilness and racism in our history, we would always forget the lessons that we learned from our mistakes as a society in the past.
What do you think about books being censored for whatever reason? Should racist or offensive books be taken down for being racist or offensive?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/dr-seuss-got-away-anti-asian-racism-long-rcna381
Hi Isaac,
ReplyDeleteI see why they cancelled these books from all websites and places to purchase them. I think that Dr. Seuss is a big children's book author and especially when children are reading these books it is not right to involve racist comments toward anyone. I think that it is not right at all to have racist comments in books, but I think that it is even worse when it is in a children's book. This can influence children and make them repeat the racist words they read in the book which is not ok.
Hey Isaac,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with this blog and think it was well written. I think you made a great point about how the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship. Additionally, I do not think these books should have been taken away and there are numerous other famous cartoon characters and movies that have been removed recently for similar reasons. I think it is silly to be focussing our efforts on canceling long-loved cartoon characters, which does nothing, when our country is facing much bigger issues such as COVID.
Hey Isaac,
ReplyDeleteI also agree with this blog post. In my opinion, people are too sensative when it comes to cancel culture. Dr. Seuss teaches amazing lessons and I don't see the problem with his books. I've looked through a lot of the "racist" images and I don't view them as that at all.