Even good old Dr. Seuss’s zany imagination
could not have ever thunk a place as crazy as our nation.
Where decent folks, quite sane in fact, upon one knee quite bended
Fear the cry of “racist!” from the perpetually offended.
Who scream and swear and stamp their feet at everyone else’s sins;
They cannot create, they only destroy, so do not let them win!
This book is a real classic, so I hope that people pirate it like crazy now that the Geisel estate has decided to cancel it. Is this book truly racist? The image of a “Chinese man who eats with sticks” is admittedly an insensitive racial stereotype that was probably informed by Geisel’s own prejudices, which he later denounced. But that doesn’t justify removing it from print, much less banning it from sale or digitally burning it.
There’s a difference between books like Mein Kampf and How To Be An Anti-Racist that overtly proselytize racist ideologies, and books like this that were simply informed by the racism of their time. Every generation has its own blood and sins, ours no less than any other. Our present moral panic over “racism,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy” will, in the fullness of time, be viewed with the same contempt and horror that we now view the Salem witch trials and the red scare of McCarthyism.
It would have been better to let this old classic fade gracefully into our cultural history, warts and all, but the perpetually offended cannot create–they can only destroy. Sadly, I fear that many more books will be burned before this moral panic is over.