Just saw an announcement that Dr Seuss Enterprises is ceasing publishing 6 of his books:

To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937)
If I Ran the Zoo (1950)
McElligot's Pool (1947)
On Beyond Zebra! (1955)
Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953)
The Cat's Quizzer (1976)

The stated reason is "hurtful portrayals" of certain individuals, meaning racial caricatures. If you look at the dates, you see that most reflect attitudes of their time, though that is no defense for resorting to caricature, even if it is cartoon shorthand. I don't believe I ever looked at the latter 3. I'm kind of curious about The Cat's Quizzer, as it is from 1976, features the Cat in the Hat and is one of the few beginner reader books that Seuss did himself, rather than hired writers. The NPR article did not give specifics for those, but mentioned Asian caricatures in Mulberry and African stereotypes in If I Ran the Zoo.

I find myself kind of shuffling between points on this. It's their right and their decision and done in response to criticisms of the racial sensitivity of those works. So, that's a positive response, though some of the article ignores the context of when those works were done. All but The Cat's Quizzer were from the 1950s or earlier, with Mulberry being one of Seuss' earliest books and the one that made him a bestselling author. They were written in a period known to portray insensitive caricatures in the mass media, including literature. To me, that is the troubling aspect of the action, as it ignores context of the work and implies willful action on the part of Geisel, rather than ignorance. I have no problem with not presenting those to impressionable children, but, the First Amendment circuits in me bristle a bit about what is essentially a self-imposed ban on the books. I was a bookseller for 20 years and we sold many things which were "insensitive" and outright inflamatory, up to and including Mein Kampf. The reader should be free to chose their own work. People aren't stupid, they will ignore or reject things they find offensive; but, shouldn't that be up to the reader?

The difference here is that it is not a ban imposed by outsiders; but, by the people who own the work. So, it's one of those things that you have to accept. I do think, though, that withdrawing Mulberry, which has great historical significance, is a mistake. It seems to me that expanding the work to include a discussion of Geisel, the time period, and the caricatures and the effects of stereotyping on minority cultures would be more beneficial than outright removing it.

We see similar things with older comics works, like Tintin, with insensitive or colonial attitudes or outright racism, as in some comics of the Golden Age. The debate becomes do we wipe them from history and eliminate the offense or do we use them to illustrate attitudes of a period to educate those about continued problems in our own period? Do we alter the work to make it more sensitive? No easy answers. It just struck me a bit more, since Dr Seuss was THE author who really sparked my childhood imagination, though none of these 6 books were ones I really gravitated towards.

FOX was notorious for cancelling good shows prematurely, though now Netflix is giving them a run for their money.

An instrumental is not a song.

There, I said it, though why I have to, I don't know.

Did you get super powers?  I mean other than the power to flip a book faster than a speeding bullet...

I never knew that. Why not ?

I agree with everything you said here. Yes, they have a right to remove those books and the people acting like the Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham are being banned are ridiculous. But the decision to remove those books is misguided. Pretending they never happened doesn't solve anything. Eisner's Spirit books are still available despite the racist portrayal of the Ebony character. Keeping it out there forces us to talk about it and it's a discussion we need to have.