How about because they are good stories, often with important messages, and any objectionable content is often a reflection of the times and not intended to be hurtful?
> And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, features a “Chinese boy” with a rice bowl and chopsticks
This is the level we've stooped to now? Should Chinese restaurants stop offering chopsticks?
Why does intention matter? A 6 year old kid born 60 years after something was written does not know anything about any supposed intention. They only know what the material itself says.
If the material does not stand on it's own, then it serves no valid purpose to artficialy prop it up.
It's not censorship to remove something from being actively fed to children. It's still allowed to exist as historical artifacts. No one arrests you for posessing a copy. You are not Jesus's persecuted followers hiding from the Romans.
Who says what does or does not stand on its own? I am not seeing any negative stereotyping there, just colorful characters.
You might argue that I ought to be Chinese to have a say about it. And that'd be fair - let's ask Chinese people then! I'd be curious what they actually think. Personally, as a Jew, I wouldn't mind at all to see a "stereotypical" Orthodox depiction of a jew, with a yarmulke and all, as long as it's not negative. I fact, I might appreciate it as an artifact educating the audiences about my people's original culture.
> Its removal came after authors Mo Willems, Mike Curato and Lisa Yee co-signed a letter calling for its removal. They described the imagery as “a jarring racial stereotype of a Chinese man, who is depicted with chopsticks, a pointed hat, and slanted slit eyes. We find this caricature of ‘the Chinaman’ deeply hurtful, and have concerns about children’s exposure to it.”
The point is that this stereotypical description is negative.
It's odd the article says "boy" when the original 1937 Seuss description was "Chinaman"[1], and the updated 1973 version was "Chinese man". Also updated was the removal of the character's pigtail and the yellow skin.
It kept the slanted-eyes and pointed hat, which was part of the racist stereotype depiction of the era. See Seuss's war-time cartoons at https://apjjf.org/2017/16/Minear.html for other examples of slanted eyes in how he portrayed Americans of Japanese descent as 5th columnists ready to blow up the West Coast. That was mentioned in the article; I link to it to provide context.
Seuss made those edits in 1973 because he changed as a person. As he grew older, he worked to fight stereotypes and xenophobia.
It appears the 1937 depiction was intended to be hurtful, in that it dehumanizes the character by reducing him to a stereotype. Seuss found it problematic enough to change it.
How can you determine if the 1973 edit removed all of the intended sting?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)#Literary_use points out that by 1937 "Chinaman" was a widely-used derogatory term, to the point that in 1929 Ronald Knox's "Ten Commandments" of Detective Fiction included 'No Chinaman must figure in the story. (Note: This is a reference to common use of heavily stereotyped Asian characters in detective fiction of the time)', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Knox .
Your definition of objectionable isn't my definition of objectionable. There was once a time when having a thick skin was lauded. Now, it seems we are in a race to pander to the most thin skinned people around.
> Your definition of objectionable isn't my definition of objectionable
It's not, I'm just wondering the rationale. For my part: I'm not going to get rid of my copies of those 3 Seuss books I love—but nor am I going to grab copies of the other 3 just because they're no longer being printed.
Edit: ha! I even called it "banned", when it's anything but. Removed!
Fair enough. I can tell you that I read Scrambled Eggs Super and Mulberry Street when I was a kid, and I don't have any plans to pick up the other banned ones - but my natural gut reaction to any instances like this is disgust, because I find that generally the things being banned such as the Muppets would only offend someone who is looking for a reason to be offended.
Are you keeping them because they're books and movies that mean something to you, or are you keeping them because they have objectionable content?