This is “Orientalism”? I understood the outcry when the original cut of Disney’s Aladdin movie included a tossed off joke about dismembering people for crimes. However, I cannot be honest with myself and view it as a “stereotype.” In no way does this picture ridicule the man (or the animal), and in fact, the camel is a special kind (called a Spazzim) with elaborate horns that carry assorted objects which if anything make this man a mid-twentieth century homeowner, withĪnd also his gold-plated popping-corn popper. I understand, formally, the idea that this picture signals that this is a Middle Easterner. The man has the billowy pantaloons we would associate with an “Arab.” A building in the background seems like, if anything (which it isn’t) some kind of pagoda. Specifically, on one page a man of no delineated race (and thus we would declare him “white,” I assume) is riding a kind of camel and has a mustache. McWhorter is distressed because he loves On Beyond Zebra and reads it to his kids After his interesting take about why it’s useful to consider letters beyond “Z”, he tries to see why the image above is offensive-and fails: (It’s actually hard to find these images online: Here’s the “offensive” image that I found from that book on the Internet, depicting a man riding a creature that sort of looks like a camel, but is called a Spazzim. But now McWhorter is defending a Seuss classic, On Beyond Zebra-also one of the books they stopped printing.
I don’t know which books these are from, nor what was offensive in the other books. But they are stereotypes, particularly the second one of Africans, which is truly offensive by any standards: The first one, an Asian, was actually defended by a lot of Asians posting on Twitter, saying that “yes, we do eat with sticks and we looked like that in bygone ages.
Here are the images (from two books) that I see could justifiably be used to stop printing the books. Seuss’s other books, of course became collectors’ items the instant the announcement was made: a good demonstration of the Streisand effect. The six banned books, as well as all of Dr. In fact, they should probably keep publishing them, if for no other reason that they should go into libraries. But I certainly don’t think the books should be banned from libraries. As far as I can see, two of the books’ images really were pretty offensive, and the decision to stop printing them could be justified (I’m not sure I would, as, after all, it’s the parents who make these decisions for their kids, and couldn’t the grownups make the decision?). Seuss Enterprises stopped publishing six of Seuss’s children’s books on the grounds that they contained offensive images. Click on the screenshot to read it:Īs you know, Dr. I see he’s posted a new chapter of his book on The Elect, but today’s highlight is McWhorter’s take on one of the banned Dr. He not only thinks well, but he writes well, and, judging by his output, he writes quickly, too. The more I read John McWhorter, the more I like the man and his ideas.
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