So now suddenly, thousands of middle aged men and women are deeply hurt and upset that a few children's books that, just a few days ago, they never ever cared about, even thought about, or in some cases probably even heard of, will longer be published.
Okay, fine, maybe it’s not about the books themselves. Maybe its the idea of that decades-old relics of your childhood are somehow vanishing, or maybe it’s just another excuse to whine about and attack that “cancel culture” or “libs” in general. And given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of copies, if not millions, of each of these so-called banned book still in circulation and will continue to be in circulation, legally, long after this manufactured panic cry-fest is over, it is likely the latter.
So I’ll just clear a couple of things up. First of all, this is NOT a banning. Police are not going go door to door to confiscate your beloved copy. Heck, you can even carry it openly in public, and you won’t be breaking any law here. What simply happened is that a publisher decided it didn’t want to manufacture any new copies to sell. That’s it. All it it. Nothing to see here ladies and gentlemen.
So yes, you can still keep your copy of Mulberry Street and you are still allowed to look at it. It just so happens that I purchased this book right before the cease, not knowing that it would be ceased. So yeah, I guess I have a brand spanking new and unused money maker here. But I’ll keep it for its purpose, which was to introduce Seuss to my 4 year old son (along with several other Seuss books I purchased with it).
I didn’t know about the Chinese dude, so yeah I looked for it. It’s there. He is called a “Chinese Man” now, as Dr. Seuss himself apparently changed it in the 60’s, from “Chinaman”, as well as changed the coloring and got rid of the ponytail, due to sensitivity. Yes, Dr. Seuss himself was becoming aware, and altering his own work. Proving it was more the times than anything that was the cause of this, and that he could change as times evolve for the better, and probably would have done so himself even more so today.
If I were the publisher, I probably would have taken this course of action and just removed the offensive parts and kept publishing the books with them removed. But it is what it is, and the publisher has every right to do as it pleases.