I just read the book in the link, here is what I found:
"even Jane could think of that" ^ sexism
"Chinese man who eats with sticks" ^ racism
"even Jane could think of that" ^ sexism
"Chinese man who eats with sticks" ^ racism
Someone mentioned the depiction of the eyes was problematic, but other characters also have similar eyes and moreover, Japanese woodcuts as well as other East Asian art use similar eye representation[1]. It's a bit looney.
Who knows, maybe it's a ploy to boost flagging sales by piquing the interest of 'conscientious' parents who otherwise might have considered Dr Seuss passé.
[1]https://spokenvision.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Utamaro-...
The problem with these absurd witchhunts is that they dilute racism. At some point people give up and think "well, it must be that I'm racist" and when that happens they stop caring.
Much better than drawing a line between racist and not racist people and assuming you’re on the right side without actually interrogating it.
All of that is a bit of a tangent though because I have no opinion on the Seuss issue specifically. Didn’t seem that offensive to me but I’m not the right person to judge.
My point is precisely that other people is continuously drawing lines and everything is binary.
(The original image also had him with a queue and with yellow skin, and referred to him as "Chinaman" instead of "Chinese man".)
This was part of the negative racist depictions common in that era.
You can see other places where Seuss used slanted slit eyes, like his WWII cartoons depicting Japanese-Americans as 5th columnists - https://apjjf.org/2017/16/Minear.html .
And then there's a guy, and he's Chinese. That's it. He's not performing wonders, for people to stand and marvel, he's just a dude. In the book, the idea of "being Chinese" is enough of an oddity for people to stand and stare.
Whether one stands out or not is relative to what's accepted as normal at a time and place. A person wearing a cowboy hat and boots in the northeast will have people stand and stare at them.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the book, this is not a New Year parade.
I can understand how a society can change so that things that were formerly rare and remarkable become common and unremarkable.
I can also understand not wanting to make people feel "other".
Yet there will indeed always be things that differ interestingly from the usual practices of the day. It seems strange (heh) for everyone to suppress the (very universal, you will learn if you travel) human impulse to find difference interesting, exotic, and delightful. Eventually you will find yourself on both sides of this dynamic.
I don't necessarily have a problem with making updated versions of Dr. Seuss books that try to avoid accidentally alienating parts of a now-broader audience.
But the larger principle, of refusing to see "foreignness" as "weird", I'm not sure how to deal with. It seems the safest approach is to always suppress surprise. You cannot exoticize if you refuse to acknowledge anything as exotic. But I don't think surprise ("gaijin-das!") is always malicious, and something feels wrong, "anti-human" even, about always burying that reaction.
It also invites a certain kind of social attack, which is like a higher-stakes "you laugh, you lose".
It's as though certain parts of ourselves have been let out of the closet, but other, mostly harmless parts, have been shoved in.
I would like a way to be respectful but also human. I do not think norms are moving in that direction.
I hope they will; 3 of the 6 books they took out of print are ones I really like. But, in the end it’s not really up to me. Publishers have never asked me in the past about what books they keep in print, and I don’t expect them to start any time soon.
> I would like a way to be respectful but also human. I do not think norms are moving in that direction.
I think we’re tacking. We’ve been really bad at “respectful” for a long time, I’m not opposed to us over-emphasizing that part for a bit while we figure out what a proper balance looks like.