Debate. Debate. Debate.

mulberry street was one of my mom's favorites and while it's not hella racist, it's definitely still influentially racist

Yeah, same. It sucks to look back on things you read as a kid and realize all the issues you hadn't noticed.

As someone whose parents still make jokes about like Asian eyes and shit, that's not something we need to normalize through reading too.
Also the one depicting African characters as monkey-like is incredibly icky.

i mean, dr seuss was a political cartoonist during ww11 who created quite a few comics centered on 'yellow fever' and internment, so i get why his works feature so much anti asian shit. its not okay, duh, but i do get why it was so common in some of those

Yeah. I feel like it'd be a different story if the books were being pulled solely because of his anti-Asian political cartoons and not the content of the books, but since it appears in the books, I feel like it's fine. We shouldn't be the same society we were when his books were initially published, I don't get why some people are so mad about others saying "this is outdated and racist".

As someone whose parents still make jokes about like Asian eyes and shit, that's not something we need to normalize through reading too.
Also the one depicting African characters as monkey-like is incredibly icky.

Especially since the target audience of Dr. Seuss's books is so young, it's normalizing it from a very early age.

A lot of people see Horton Hears a Who as an allegory for abortion.

An allegory for WhAt?!?

"A persons a Person no matter how small" Is in response to racism

okay correct me if I'm wrong, but is calling POC "small" not still kinda racist

where the absolute fuck does that come from

It's been years since I've read Horton Hears a Who but I've seen pro-life people post "a person's a person no matter how small" signs and stuff on Pinterest, Facebook, etc.

Ohhh, I see. So it's probably more of a product of their misinterpretation than it actually being an allegory for abortion.

From what I can tell, yeah. I mean, you can cut and paste anything from a book and use it to push a message. See: all the people in the early 2000s who took a Voldemort line (the one about how there's no good and evil, only power and people too weak to seek it) and used it as proof that the books were "evil"

The Horton Hears a Who movie made up a lot of my childhood but I genuinely don't remember if I've ever read the book.

Yeah, but we definitely shouldn't expose kids to it when they're too young to understand because then that becomes their norm. Censorship and such only becomes a problem when we're talking about pulling media for adults, who can make decisions on what books to read, and aren't in a delicate time of socialization.

Well, yeah. So we feed young kids positive media instead of Dr. Seuss books with racist material. They're too young to understand the bad and why it's bad. But they are old enough to unknowingly pick up ideas that will impact how they view other people.