In one scenario, she’s being treated by a Black doctor who punches and pokes her and tries to get her to take a pill. At a library used book sale decades ago, I bought an early edition of Ogden Nash’s “Adventures of Isabel,” a lively rhyming tale about a gutsy little girl who faces down nightmares, bears and the like. They’re snapping up what they think will be a valuable collectible, or simply because of nostalgic fondness for the entire Seuss oeuvre, so that the books won’t entirely disappear. People who are forking over hundreds of dollars for a copy of “If I Ran the Zoo” aren’t doing it for the perverse pleasure of showering young minds with racist propaganda. They generally were read time and again by the same children, meaning that racist depictions of Chinese people wearing coolie hats and Africans with hoops in their noses were impressed deeply into their minds, and for many might have formed their first impressions of these groups.

Not that we’ve gotten past that time, but as a society, many of us are trying.īut these Seuss books were written for preschoolers and primary-grade students. Most adults are smart enough to know the difference between acceptable and deplorable depictions of marginalized people, and how much of the latter comes from eras in which the deplorable was accepted and far too often celebrated. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing those books, but not because all books with racist content should be banned. The Los Angeles Times editorial board supported the decision by Dr. That’s what the site has announced, after prices on the books shot up to the clouds on the news that they wouldn’t be printed because of racist imagery and some racist wording. Seuss are now banned from auction or sale on the site? So how is it that the six discontinued books by Dr. Terrible books with troubling content shouldn’t be erased from all memory.

EBay allows people to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on its site, as well as the infamously false and anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “Peter Pan,” laden with stereotypes about Native Americans, is for sale there, along with the many books of the “Little House on the Prairie” series, which includes minstrel shows, refers to Black people as “darkies” and contains many negative depictions of Native Americans even though the white protagonists were illegally squatting on Indian land.Īnd it’s fine that all of these are sold.

Ebay if i ran the zoo