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Citlali Martinez:

I chose this article called 'Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books because it has some views that I agree with. It talks about cancelling cancel culture. The way the article states it, "Embrace Dr. Seuss’s poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism." The books are already written and there is no denying we have read them or were a fan at one point. There is a difference between admiring the work in terms of how well the poem, book, article etc. is written and supporting the message of racism/sexism behind it.

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Emily McLaughlin:
I have added this resource because it reminded me of this week's reading "Harry Potter Saved My Life. J.K. Rowling is Now Endangering Trans People Like Me." We all have strong connections and feelings tied to the literature we read as a child. Its hard to untangle the feelings of love for an author's work and the disappointment, frustration, and anger we feel when the author themselves are racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-sematic, etc. It is hard to navigate the line between appreciating literature from your childhood and cancelling the offensive author.

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Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts (Published 2021)

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The beloved author’s most famous books, like “Green Eggs and Ham,” were untouched, but his estate’s decision nevertheless prompted a backlash and raised questions about what should be preserved as part of the cultural record.

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Daphne Tran:

This article is about an online author named Alexa Dumas who shares her point of view when it comes to cancel culture on many authors of children's literature such as Dr. Seuss. She claims that the idea of cancelling all books by Dr. Seuss and his books are unnecessary because not all of his books are worthy of cancelling which I agree with. She mentioned that the following books were to be discontinued: “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” “The Cat’s Quizzer,” “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo.” I can see why these books were cancelled. "If I Ran the Zoo" displayed numerous racist images such as Asian men with exaggerated slant lines drawn for eyes and monkeys to represent people from Africa. These types of illustrations are extremely offensive to us as adults, but most children will see no wrong in them. This is why some selected children's books are dangerous, but not all. We don't want them to get the idea that there's no harm to these illustrations when it's the exact opposite. There is no reason to cancel all of Dr. Seuss's books or him as an individual author because some of his books are great for children to begin reading to expand their literacy skills. As Alexa stated, "Publishing companies can edit, update and remove illustrations that may be offensive" and "children should feel represented, and it should start with a book just like “The Cat in the Hat.”".

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The newly elected Biden administration feels like a fresh start to some, while others fear the change in power will do more harm than good. Biden's approval rating is seen at 53.6%, while his disapproval rate is at 40.3%, as of March 17. In 2021's emergence, not only has new government representation been put into place, but aspects of American childhood have been recently examined.

Most children grew up reading books by Theodore Giesel, better known as Dr. Seuss, in their homes, elementary schools or even at their local libraries. Seuss' rhyme scheme, colorful scenery and odd-looking characters are a staple of growing up in the United States.

Recently, six of his books have been under review by Dr. Seuss Enterprises and publishing was stopped as of March 2, due to racial stereotypes.

The six books that will be discontinued are "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!," "The Cat's Quizzer," "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" and "If I Ran the Zoo."

Elaine Ostry, associate professor of English, teaches a course on children's literature. She stated that "older children and teenagers have a better understanding of historical context when it comes to stereotyping in literature, while younger children may have a harder time understanding."

"When you're thinking about young children, you have to be very careful with what kinds of images they see and what kind of messages they receive," Ostry said. "We have to come to a point in society where we understand that not everything that we grew up with was great."

Not only is the text important, but the illustrations that children see are as well. Books such as Seuss' 1937 work "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," paint a harmful image of the Asian culture. The illustration depicts "a Chinese man who eats with sticks," as stated in the children's book, while the man has yellow skin and is eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks.

Publishing companies can edit, update and remove illustrations that may be offensive.

"You can edit children's books," Ostry said. "You can update them, edit them. I wouldn't do this for older readers because I think an older reader can understand when something is part of a historical period that has different attitudes. It's much more likely that they have a context for these things."

Educators may have a different approach to the books as well. Junior general and special childhood education major Kristen Kavanagh believes classroom teachers should still use the Seuss books as a learning tool for young students.

"If kids were to be looking through it on their own, I think they would kind of be learning inappropriate things, because they might not understand that it is inappropriate today," Kavanagh said. "So if a teacher is walking them through it, it's kind of that teachable moment. If they're reading the book- say this was back then. That's what was accepted. Now it's not."

Some conservatives, such as the U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have turned to social media to claim that he still liked Dr. Seuss after the decision was made to stop publishing the books. This was seen as a stab toward his liberal constituents who agree with Dr. Seuss Enterprises' statement.

"Dr. Seuss is not canceled," Kavanagh said. "You can still celebrate the books that he's written as an author without saying that. I'm kind of upset that people are relating it to cancel culture. I feel like it almost is making a media spectacle out of it, where they're making the focus him being canceled rather than talking about why the books are no longer being published."

The Dr. Seuss books are not the only aspect of American childhood that is feeding into the trend of "cancel culture." Hasbro, the popular toy company, issued a statement Feb. 25 that it will no longer be calling the Potato Head toy line "Mr." and "Mrs." This decision was to allow for more gender-neutral toys for children of all ages.

"I think that it is important to move away from thinking about gender as a binary system, one in which there's only a male and female gender, and move towards one in which understands gender identity as a spectrum," Kolleen Duley, assistant professor of gender and women's studies, said.

Toys like the newly rebranded Potato Head can allow for children to become more comfortable with themselves and conform less to what a more conservative society views in the case of gender.

Duley stated that, "The more that we allow children to be their authentic selves and the more options we give them outside of this rigid binary, the more they can be free to accept who they are."

The largest way to empower society to change is education, and the best way to start is with the younger generation.

"I think that the more early education we can give children, allows them to view not only their toys but themselves as not exclusively assigned to the gender they were born with," Duley said. "The better positioned we are to build a diverse and inclusive future for all of us."

Not only can children start to express themselves and accept who they are, but they also must see themselves represented in the toys they play with and the books they read.

"Books are mirrors for children; they're windows for them," Kavanagh said. "They can see themselves in books, and they should see themselves or learn about other cultures. Maybe we can rewrite the Seuss books, or get different illustrations in them, and change them to make it more modern and more reflecting of what society looks like today."

Learning and growing from the past and rebranding to become more inclusive shouldn't be "canceled." These new values that children's companies are making will create a more diverse and self-expressive environment for new generations to grow up in.

Children should feel represented, and it should start with a book just like "The Cat in the Hat."

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The newly elected Biden administration feels like a fresh start to some, while others fear the change in power will do more harm than good. Biden's approval rating is seen at 53.6%, while his disapproval rate is at 40.3%, as of March 17.

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Coriander Johnson:
I chose this article because it is one that surprised and shocked me almost as much as J.K. Rowling did. I remember as a kid growing up on these book and having dozens of them in my home. (my mom loved them and collected them) I loved reading the books and trying to figure out how to say all the rhymes without getting tongue tied. When thinking about the question on whether or not we should call in, call out, or cancel I was stuck between call out and cancel. I feel that to call out a person is to give them room to understand and ponder what they might have done or said and to mend and grow from their wrong doings. On the other hand, cancel can be just as beneficial for someone who has already been called out and chooses not to see where they could be wrong or hurting someone.

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Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts (Published 2021)

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The beloved author’s most famous books, like “Green Eggs and Ham,” were untouched, but his estate’s decision nevertheless prompted a backlash and raised questions about what should be preserved as part of the cultural record.

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Nancy Rodriguez:

I decided to post this article because it first describes what "cancel culture is," which helps us have a better idea of what it means. Besides, the author of this article talks about how six Dr. Seuss books are no longer published due to racist and insensitive portrayals. This part really surprised me, and it got me thinking about how controversial racism has been in many aspects of life, including literature. However, I think the author made a point by mentioning that changing stories to be appropriate for children isn't something new. The author said how other books have been changed and that that is totally normal if not, we will be stuck with the same stories. Lastly, I liked how towards the end, the author mentioned that racism is never okay and that adults and children should start diversifying their bookshelf.

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Her Campus | HerCampus.com is the #1 global community for college women, written entirely by the nation's top college journalists from 380+ campus chapters around the world.

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About a week ago, the Dr Seuss estate stated that they will no longer be publishing six of his books due to racists tropes and insensitive portrayals. Almost immediately following the announcement, many have claimed Dr Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel, to be the latest victim of the ever controversial "cancel culture". If you are unaware, "cancel culture" is a new form of exclusion where someone is forced out of a social or professional circle, most commonly via social media. "Cancel culture" is constantly under scrutiny, most commonly by conservatives, for being in violation of our first amendment right of free speech. This instance with Dr Seuss is no different with conservative voices like Brian Kilmeade of Fox News who claimed, "The cancel culture is canceling Dr Seuss...It's out of control." First let me just say, Dr Seuss is not "canceled", he is simply finally being held somewhat accountable for his racism. Second, changing or even ending publication of certain children's books has not come with this idea of "cancel culture" but has been happening for a long time. Why the outrage now? In fact, the six books that are no longer being published include some racist imagery that contradict the different views Geisel himself developed later in life, leading some to believe that even he might have been ashamed of these works. Early in his career during the second world war, Geisel created overtly racist, anti-Japanese cartoons but found his original beliefs to be wrong once he visited Japan years later and spoke with those who witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. Following this realization, his apology came in the form of a new book - Horton Hears a Who!

Photo by Nicholas Swatz from Pexels

Like I previously mentioned, intense editing or ceasing publication of children's books due to racist or insensitive portrayals is not new. The immensely popular children's series Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were originally published starting in 1930 and 1927 respectively, but went through a big update in 1959. While the publishers made small edits the series such as including more modern slang and an electric guitar, they also changed multiple characters from horribly racist stereotypes to white, or they deleted the character altogether. So, while the series as a whole became way more white, the stories also became less blatantly racist. Even Geisel himself made revisions on some of his stories during his lifetime in an effort to "tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books". Changing stories to make them more appropriate for children is normal. If it wasn't, children would still be hearing the version of Cinderella where the step-sisters cut off their own feet to fit into the shoe.

So no, Dr Seuss is not canceled. What's actually happening is our world is evolving and instead of reading racist Dr Seuss books we have plenty of diverse, unproblematic children's titles to choose from instead. With a quick Google search, you are able to find dozens of lists for Dr Seuss alternatives to read to your children. What is often perceived as "cancel culture" is actually just people being held accountable for their racism or otherwise offensive actions or behaviors. The world has not gone "soft" and isn't full of "snowflakes" but is actually starting to hold racists accountable for their actions. Also, the argument that "it was a different time back then" doesn't cut it either. You can acknowledge the time period of a piece of work without excusing the racism as, news flash, racism is never okay no matter the time period. With all that being said, whether it's full of adult or children literature, consider diversifying your bookshelf. You can often learn so much more from the stories you don't see yourself in.

HCXO,

Maeve

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Is Dr Seuss Canceled? Cancel Culture and Children's Literature | Her Campus

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About a week ago, the Dr Seuss estate stated that they will no longer be publishing six of his books due to racists tropes and insensitive portrayals. Almost immediately following the announcement, many have claimed Dr Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel, to be the latest victim of the ever controversial "cancel culture".

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* Peter Le *

I decided to add this article to our discussion because I find it interesting to discover how there has been an ongoing secret tradition about some classic children's books containing offensive and racist tropes were removing this content without any awareness from readers or those who likely want to cancel these authors and works. I figure this is most likely through the process of "calling in" by activists engaging in secret conversations with the author or rep behind the scenes to address the content in these books that are seen as offensive and from there changes are made which readers might not have pinpointed out. Since these children's books made changes undercover, I see there aren't any huge breakout reactions, but probably because social media had not been in existence when these changes are finally made. The article sets the notion where children's books with offensive and racist content that deserve to be canceled can be updated if proper engagements addressing these issues with the authors are made and the authors are willing to change their stories. The article ends that changing stories is necessary to reflect on the current views of society and how this tradition has been part of our history for a while which we have not known yet. But I feel making changes to these stories will not be enough yet, as more details and controversies about these stories will be uncovered more later on as time progresses.

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Dr Seuss ‘cancelled’? There’s nothing new about cutting racism from children’s books

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Pundits up in arms about removing offensive tropes from his books forget this is part of a long tradition, from Mary Poppins to Nancy Drew

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Daniella Carrera

I choose this article because it really brings the emotional side of cancel culture into perspective. Cancel culture is complex in many ways, there is always the feeling of heartbreak when your favorite celebrity, book, or author is "canceled". This article focused on the way that we have had to cancel some of our favorite nostalgic books and how that is very hard for people. Entire childhoods were shaped around stories such as Harry Potter, Dr. Suess, and so many others so when those support systems are taken away it may be hard for those audiences to recover. It's hard to separate love for the characters from disappointment from the author who created them but one line that really stood out to me was "That’s not cancellation. That’s cultivation. That’s healing. That’s love."

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Lily Lopez :)

I decided to post a short video about the difference between callout culture and cancel culture for those like me that needed an extra explanation. lol
Six or four months ago I was reading a post on Facebook about a cartoon that I used to watch as a child. As you can imagine anyone talking about against the cartoon that I used to watch was like a personal offense. Days later, another post talking about another cartoon that teenagers were trying to banned because they felt that the cartoon was racist and offensive. Then I talked to some members of my family, old ones, and explained them what I read and what was happening. Their words were the same as mine, "what is happening with today's culture" specially children. I feel that today's culture is getting offended for everything and every single comment that other's make. I am not against anyone or make fun of any one,  culture or ideology, but I believe there is something wrong with "cancel culture" And truly think we should be stronger than that.
In the video it is mentioned the example of a cisgender actress that is being callout for accepting the role of a trans character. For which the trans community considered it that it could send the message that trans men aren't really men, and that they are just women who dressed up.  Really?
It makes me sad to think that we have been fighting for so long for freedom, and we are still not free to express ourselves, to write, or to give an opinion. We have to walk carefully being afraid of what might others think about our thoughts. How Many books I will never have the opportunity to read just because others think they are offensive. Let me decide please!

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Callout Culture VS Cancel Culture | LGBTQ+ Guide to Being a Better Ally | 78hundred

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Sophia Kruse:

I have chosen this article mainly due to its focus on cancel culture. I feel like cancel culture is a much newer idea, directly linked with social media. As we know the media is not always honest & truthful, but a lot of todays youth only gets their information from social media, believing the first thing they read making it easy to "cancel" everyone. In my opinion, I love the idea of cancelling cancel culture. Of course sometimes truth may be revealed, and absolutely if there is racist and cruel acts they should be exposed. Growing up thinking one way & enjoying some of your childhood authors in such a pure light makes it hard to look beyond and be able to judge for yourself if the intent behind these stories were cruel.

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Priscilla Koh
As I was researching about cancel culture within children's literature, I wasn't surprised to see a lot of articles referring to Dr. Seuss and JK Rowling. Their writings have immensely shaped a culture that's still with us today despite the fact that the authors hold saddening perspectives. Out of everything I read, this article really stood out to me because of this quote, "Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent" (Strauss). This quote resonated with me so deeply because over the course of my lifetime, I haven't realized how much content with underlying racism, microaggressions, sterotypes, and more I have been absorbing until I started higher education. I definitely feel like cancel culture has cultivated a toxic community in which the audience leaves no room for the person to learn and reflect upon what they did wrong and fix themselves for the better. Of course, what the authors say or do that indirectly harm the lives of other people are never okay, but cancel culture should be rebranded, or re-cultivated into something else that allows room for growth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Wesley Su: This article goes into some detail about how cancel culture affects authors, and it also shows the process of cancel culture. I chose this article because it mentions the well-known author J.K. Rowling, who had written the Harry Potter stories that I've read and watched. The article stated how J.K. Rowling got cancelled by fans and how that cancelling affected the employees involved with Rowling. The article also describes how other authors were affected by cancel culture, including authors Jeanine Cummins and Julie Burchill. I also chose this article because it shows how cancel culture is used by social media. I use social media regularly to keep in contact with friends and for news as well. The article quotes Lauren Taylor Shute, “You’re entering into a dialogue and everything you put out there opens a door to discussion, so be sure that it’s a room you want to enter first, because you will have an audience and they will talk back.” And I can't agree with this statement enough because I've seen many people on especially Instagram and Twitter get called out after posting something that many people found offensive. After that happens, sometimes the individual receiving the backlash would deactivate their accounts, go private, or post an apology. If the person is an artist, it can be difficult for their followers to appreciate their art/craft without regarding the artist's personal opinions.

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ho would have thought that in 2021, as cancel culture becomes the new norm, the effect on authors has been to plunge the literary world into a freedom of speech crisis? Author Lionel Shriver calls it "a quasi-Soviet phenomenon".

A writer says or writes something controversial on social media, in print or on TV. The news breaks, the crowd bays for blood, the tide turns and the writer is "cancelled", shunned or left with a badly-damaged reputation.

In the past year, high-profile authors targeted include JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, Jeanine Cummins, and Julie Burchill, and there are plenty more, many of whom we have never heard of. Some are deemed to have committed worse crimes than others, resulting in anything from mild censorship to accusations of insensitivity, cultural appropriation, misogyny, racism or transphobia, while others have had their book contracts revoked - and writers must learn to navigate this moralistic new world.

"Publishers are not working in a vacuum, they're part of a larger social tide," says Shriver. "They read the same newspapers we do, and they're frightened like everyone else, because it's a merciless movement, with people piling onto the side of righteousness for self-protection." But as righteous as publishers may be, they are also in the business of making money.

Take JK Rowling, who was labelled a toxic transphobe after she posted a tweet mocking the word "people" who menstruate instead of "women". First it was trans activists, then leading Harry Potter actors Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Eddie Redmayne came out against her. Now, former Potter fans are expressing doubts about whether it is still "acceptable" to enjoy the books.

Staff working on Rowling's latest children's book, The Ickabog, at Hachette were so "upset" they threatened to down tools. The management pushed back. "We will never make our employees work on a book whose content they find upsetting for personal reasons, but we draw a distinction between that and refusing to work on a book because they disagree with an author's views outside their writing, which runs contrary to our belief in free speech," was the official statement.

A former employee puts it differently. "The employees were encouraged to follow diversity and pro-trans initiatives. There was only one way we were supposed to think about these issues, but then JK Rowling, their most successful author, said what she said, so the management had to take a stand in favour of free speech and face down the younger staff. That's when they realised these initiatives had gone too far in the first place, which a lot of employees felt, but no one was prepared to come out and say it."

Shriver, who admits that her anti-woke opinions make her publishers "anxious", thinks the staff at Hachette should have been allowed to walk out. "I feel that strongly. Let the minions who rise up leave, they're replaceable. The more you play to this idea of power, the more power you give them. This is a story of institutional cowardice, with people in positions of authority frightened of exercising that authority."

Similarly, the news that Penguin Random House Canada would be publishing outspoken Canadian psychologist and life coach Jordan Peterson's sequel to his 12 Rules for Life apparently reduced many of its employees "to tears".

The publishing company's diversity and inclusion committee received at least 70 anonymous messages from staff with only a couple in favour of publishing it. The book went ahead anyway and comes out in March. Like Rowling, Peterson is lucrative. 12 Rules sold over five million copies, but as Shriver points out, few other authors have that degree of "fame and fortune" protection.

For Julie Burchill, whose book, Welcome to the Woke Trials became a casualty of the very issue it was describing, after her comments on Twitter to Muslim "libertarian communist" journalist Ash Sarkar.

Constable swiftly cancelled Burchill's contract. "While there is no legal definition of hate speech in the UK, we believe that Julie's comments on Islam are not defensible from a moral or intellectual standpoint," it said. Burchill retorted she would look for another publisher. "They said I'd crossed the line and would probably do so again. They're not wrong. But they knew what I was like." She says she has three publishers "brave and small as opposed to big and cowardly" interested in her book.

Cancel culture feeds on the public's perception of reputation. Who do you know, what is your identity? Combined with the growth of corporate culture - and some of these publishers are now vast behemoths - reputation and brand values are everything. "Cancelling an author's contract if they bring your organisation into disrepute is entirely justified. In the US, a lot of contracts now include clauses to this effect, " according to another publisher.

Writers must also beware of other potential booby traps. After her novel American Dirt, about an illegal Mexican migrant, was published in 2019, Jeanine Cummins was accused of cultural appropriation because she is not Mexican, and of filling the novel with stereotypes. Violent threats caused her publishers to cancel a book tour, but Cummins now says her biggest regret was writing the "clumsy" author's note justifying her reasons for writing it. "But that just served to open the door for people to make their criticisms extremely personal instead of about the book," she says.

Cancel culture's biggest ally is social media. Lauren Taylor Shute, who runs an editorial coaching consultancy in New York, tells aspiring authors: "You're entering into a dialogue and everything you put out there opens a door to discussion, so be sure that it's a room you want to enter first, because you will have an audience and they will talk back." They sure will.

This raises a question. Would any UK firm publish Donald Trump's memoirs? A fortnight ago Republican senator Josh Hawley's book about the tyranny of big tech was scrapped by Simon & Schuster, after he was photographed raising his fist in salute to pro-Trump protesters on his way to the US Capitol. The general consensus seems to be not. "Who wants to be associated with Trump? You've got to think of your company brand."

Almost everyone I spoke to for this article was nervous about expressing their views openly, while publishers were not prepared to talk on the record. What does that tell us?

An exception was Mark Richards, who set up indie publishing imprint Swift last year. "The role of publishers is to help society talk about the most difficult issues. But, with a few exceptions, they have become far too one-sided on far too many topics, arbiters not facilitators of debate. And that's not good for publishing or society."

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The war on words: how cancel culture is taking over the world of books

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ho would have thought that in 2021, as cancel culture becomes the new norm, the effect on authors has been to plunge the literary world into a freedom of speech crisis? Author Lionel Shriver calls it "a quasi-Soviet phenomenon". A writer says or writes something controversial on social media, in print or on TV.

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Like many, I grew up reading Dr. Seuss's books. My parents collected his books and created my personal library filled with my favorite Dr. Seuss books.  As a child, I recalled learning how to read his books that had a fun rhythmic flow and illustrations that were interesting and far from typical. As a child, I didn't think much of it; however, now that I am an adult,  I see why so many people are upset with some of his work. Is racism ok? Never. Should it be punished? Absolutely! But is does canceling Dr. Seuss solve any problems? Personally, I don't believe so. In my opinion, getting angry doesn't solve anything. We must take action to stop racism and educate our youth, and while some may consider canceling him as the only solution, I think we should use this as a teaching moment. I don't want to upset anyone as this is solely my opinion, but I believe canceling an author doesn't make us less racist, but it makes us sweep racism under the rug. If we were to cancel Dr. Seuss, we would never be forced to face the uncomfortableness of the racism we face in America. If these books were to get withdrawn, then we would miss a good teaching opportunity about racism. Children are bright, and they can examine and reject racism on their own.

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Note: Due to the nature of this story, this article contains images that some might find offensive.

Critics lambasted "woke" culture earlier this month after Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would no longer publish six of the celebrated author's books due to racist and insensitive imagery.

Detractors accused liberals of "canceling" the beloved children's author who sold more than 650 million books worldwide. But it was the company founded by Dr. Seuss's family that decided to stop printing the six books because they "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."
'Hurtful and wrong'
The offensive images in the canceled books contain disturbing racist stereotypes of Black people, Asians and Arabs.

"He often sees national or ethnic or racial difference as exotic and as fun, or as funny," says Philip Nel, a distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University and author of "Dr. Seuss: American Icon."

"In highlighting the exotic of somebody, or the otherness of somebody as a point of amusement, you are telling people that national or ethnic or racial difference can be the punch line, and that is painful if you are a member of the group who is the punch line."

The canceled books include "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street"; "If I Ran the Zoo"; "McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!"; "Scrambled Eggs Super!"; and "The Cat's Quizzer."
Iconic author
Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, died in 1991. During a prolific career that spanned decades and produced dozens of books, he used playful, rhythmic language, an anti-authoritarian tone, and whimsical, often outlandish, illustrations to help teach millions of children to read.

"In American children's literature, Dr. Seuss is one of the dominant figures," says Nel, who also directs the children's literature program at Kansas State University. "It's been estimated that one out of four children receive, as its first book, a Dr. Seuss book. So, you know, he's a giant in the world of American children's literature."

Allegations of racist stereotypes in the author's work are not new. The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum in Geisel's hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, removed a mural after some authors refused to visit the museum in protest. The mural depicted a Chinese character with slanted eyes, chopsticks and a pointed hat.

"The librarians have known about this for a long time and have been discussing this for decades," says Jason Homer, executive director of the Worcester Public Library, located near the museum.

Homer says Dr. Seuss books are not particularly popular at his libraries. Only one - "The Cat in the Hat" - was among the top 100 children's titles checked out last year. Two of the banned titles have not been in circulation at the library for years, but the ones the library does own will remain on the shelves.

"Removing these books because people might object very much goes against what we stand for as a public library. We want to provide materials. Our job is to enlighten, enrich and inform our community," Homer says. "And we can still have those informational conversations, even with these depictions that may be harmful or are harmful, to how we develop thoughts about other cultures. However, we did not remove the books."
Political cartoons
Geisel's racist imagery exists outside of his popular children's books. He published political cartoons during World War II containing harmful stereotypes of Japanese Americans that questioned their patriotism.

Historian Richard Minear, author of "Dr. Seuss Goes to War," says Geisel, who was of German ancestry, was a contradiction in that he avoided stereotyping Europeans and did promote anti-racism themes.

"He's very pro-Black-white race relations. Is very against anti-Semitism," Minear says. "The one blind spot ... is his depictions of Japan and the Japanese. ... Maybe because he had no background, his cartoons very quickly became a stereotyped Japanese figure that is offensive at best, and horribly racist at worst."

There is evidence that Geisel eventually regretted his early depictions of non-white people. Some of his later books, such as "Horton Hears a Who!" and "The Sneeches and Other Stories" offer lessons on tolerance and inclusion.

Despite a mixed legacy, Dr. Seuss should continue to be celebrated as an artist and poet, Nel says.

"Just because someone is popular or a genius, doesn't mean that he's beyond reproach. Doesn't mean that he is also not the product of a racist society, which shaped his imagination in ways that create damage in his books and create images that damage others," he says. "And that's OK. That's a healthy relationship to have with any art."

There will now be fewer visits to Mulberry Street. And while it is the end of the story for these six titles, dozens of beloved Dr. Seuss books remain in print for future generations of children to discover.

"How many writers from the 1940s and '50s are we still reading today?" Minear says. "How could a person so right-minded on so many issues, be so bad here? In that sense, I think make it a teaching moment, rather than 'cancel culture,' or whatever the right phrase is."

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Is It Time to Cancel Dr. Seuss Due to Racist Imagery?

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Note: Due to the nature of this story, this article contains images that some might find offensive. Critics lambasted "woke" culture earlier this month after Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would no longer publish six of the celebrated author's books due to racist and insensitive imagery.

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Julissa Guadalupe Lopez Garcia:

I chose this blogging site page as a resource on the call in, call out, cancel topic that we are discussing in class. I chose this blog page because the blogger, Cynthia Parkhill, talks about the effects of the call in, call out, and cancel culture. Parkhill even provides specific examples of authors falling as victims, learning from their mistakes, or having their faults pointed out. Parkhill talks about the misrepresentation of minority groups, including the ones with disabilities like her. She also talks about the dangers of attacking authors who did not mean any harm as well as the threat that authors can be to readers, including young readers if they misrepresent minorites. It is clear that the call in, call out, cancel culture is found among readings that include religious and sexual content. This should not be the case because religion and sexuality is part of our everyday lives.

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This semester, for SOC 2 at Santa Rosa Junior College, I compiled a Literature Review that examines: How does "cancel culture" affect efforts toward greater diversity in children's and Young Adult publishing?

INTRODUCTION:
Among authors, readers, librarians, educators, and others, a grassroots social movement seeks greater diversity in literature for children and young adults.

Specifically, the movement addresses a disparity that favors books about white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied protagonists. This paper looks at literature in scholarly journals, trade publications, and the print news media to examine the effect of "cancel culture" on efforts toward greater diversity in children's and Young Adult publishing.

"Cancel culture," in the realm of children's and Young Adult literature, refers to the online harassment of authors who write about people from marginalized communities. Such an incident might begin with a single negative review, which quickly becomes amplified as other readers re-post and "pile-on."

WHY REPRESENTATION MATTERS:
In a landmark essay, Bishop (1990) touted books' ability to serve as "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors" into another person's life.

"Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience." (Bishop 1990).

The problem, as related by Bishop, is that, while reading becomes a "means of self-affirmation" for some, non-white readers have found it futile to seek their mirrors in books. "When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part. Our classrooms need to be places where all the children from all the cultures that make up the salad bowl of American society can find their mirrors." (Bishop 1990.)

Many contemporary activists toward greater diversity in books make reference to Bishop's metaphor. For example, in their 2018 study, "Messages Matter: Investigating the Thematic Content of Picture Books Portraying Underrepresented Racial and Cultural Groups," Aronson, Callahan, and O'Brien state:

"When children find themselves reflected in a book mirror, or when they catch a glimpse of people different from them through a book window, what are they seeing? What types of portrayals are they encountering, and what do those images convey? Messages matter. Books and the ideas they present have influence over the minds of people who read them; not all diverse books convey the same message, and not all messages have the same effect" (Aronson 2018:165).

This issue has significance for me, both personally and professionally. Personally, I'm a member of a marginalized group. (Being a person on the autism spectrum, I have an "invisible" disability, and I prioritize books that depict people with autism in a respectful and accurate way.) Professionally, through my work in a library, I seek to ensure that my library's collection mirrors its customers' diversity.

Because of my commitment to greater diversity among the protagonists of books, I'm concerned about efforts that might hinder, rather than help, these efforts. Hence my wish with this paper, to examine recent literature about the effects of "cancel culture."

CHALLENGES TO GREATER DIVERSITY:
Industry demographics
One of the challenges affecting representation of more diverse characters in literature, is that publishing-industry staffing remains overwhelmingly white (Lee and Low 2020).

A 2019 survey conducted by Lee and Low reported that, while numbers in an earlier study "contributed to a sense of urgency that has resulted in more diverse books being published in the marketplace today - at least on the children's book side," the industry continues to be dominated by cis-gender white women and people who identify themselves as straight or heterosexual.

Lee and Low did note that more people self-identified as having a disability between its 2019 and 2015 surveys, but acknowledged that how the question was worded, may have helped account for the gain (2020).

The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) in the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, tracks representation of minority characters in children's books. CCBC figures for 2018 showed that 50 percent of children's books that it received that year still depicted white protagonists (Huyck 2019).

An infographic by Huyck and Dahlen (shown above) illustrates a continuing disparity: 1 percent depicting American Indian or First Nation protagonists, 5 percent depicting Latino / Latina, 7 percent depicting Asian Pacific Islander / Asian Pacific American, and 10 percent depicting African / African American. In contrast to these numbers, 50 percent of books featured a white protagonist.

Children's books were more likely to feature animals or "other" characters (27 percent) than ethnic minorities (Huyck 2019).

Jennifer Baker, production editor at Teachers College Press in New York, observed that while discussions were taking place around more authors and illustrators of color, "It was very interesting what wasn't being talked about: Who are the editors? Who are the agents? Who are the production editors? Who are the marketers, the contributors, and all that stuff?" (Maher 2019:10).

Effects of 'cancel culture'
Another challenge affecting greater diversity is "cancel culture's" harassment of authors who have written books about people from marginalized communities. In this literature review, I will draw attention to both objective, and subjective elements, of how efforts toward greater diversity are affected by online reviewers and the "pile-ons" that amplify negative attacks toward the writers of these books.

OBJECTIVE DOCUMENTATION:
Among articles I surveyed, Benedictus comes closest toward providing quantitative figures about how widespread the problem is.

While most articles focus on two or three books, which were written by specific authors, Benedictus relates that when he was looking for people to interview for his article for The Guardian, he "approached 24 people, in several countries, all writing in English. In total, 15 authors replied, of whom 11 agreed to talk to me, either by email or on the phone. Two subsequently withdrew, in one case following professional advice. Two have received death threats and five would only talk if I concealed their identity. This is not what normally happens when you ask writers for an interview" (Benedictus 2019).

Without citing actual numbers, Rosenfield stated that her attempts to report on YA Twitter's "Toxic Drama" were "met with intense pushback."

"[S]everal influential authors instructed their followers not to speak to me; and one librarian and member of the Newbery Award committee tweeted at Vulture nearly a dozen times accusing them of enabling 'a washed-up YA author' engaged in 'a personalized crusade' against the entire publishing community ... With one exception, all my sources insisted on anonymity, citing fear of professional damage and abuse" (Rosenfield 2017).

From the articles I read, here is a list of authors and books that were targeted by online criticism.

John Boyne, author of My Brother's Name Is Jessica : Boyne, who is gay but not transgender, was subject to insults on Twitter for his appearance and his sexuality. "Some critics proposed a boycott of Boyne's novel, which was not withdrawn. Others made veiled threats to his safety" (Benedictus 2019).

E.E. Charlton-Trujillo, author of When We Was Fierce : Publication of the book was postponed "amid increasing controversy" around the "use of a made-up dialect along with what some deem as stereotypical characters" (Barack 2016). Jennifer Baker, creator of the podcast Minorities in Publishing and member of We Need Diverse Books, found the book "glaringly offensive." "'When We Was Fierce was highly problematic from the inaccuracies to this very arm's length approach, [and] the stereotyping of black characters specifically,' she says. 'The made up dialect the author used was so egregious, it is horrible'" (Barack 2016).

Keira Drake, author of The Continent : The book, which had circulated for seven months pre-publication in advance reader copies, was criticized and called "racist" for Native American stereotypes. Drake initially tried to defend herself, but "as the day went on, I realized, 'Oh, my God. Oh, it's so true.' Drake contacted her publisher, Harlequin Teen, and asked to push back the publication date so she could make revisions." Printed hardcovers were destroyed, and a new version of the book was released March 27, 2018 (Mason 2018).

Laurie Forest, author of The Black Witch : Objections to this book, apparently launched by a single blogger, "largely centered around the book's racist characters saying racist things as part of a story in which the protagonist learns to overcome her racism" (Singal 2019, p. 60). Based almost solely on that one blogger's opinion, "the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release" (Rosenfield 2017).

Kosoko Jackson, author of A Place for Wolves : His book was touted as an #OwnVoices book, "a hashtag attached approvingly to books in which the author shares a particular marginalized identity with his subject" (Graham 2019). And Jackson, who "worked as a 'sensitivity reader' for major publishers of YA fiction" (ibid), was part of "a small and informal but intense online community that scolded writers who ran afoul of these values in their work or online" (ibid). But a pre-publication review on Goodreads raised several concerns, including the book's "use of a recent genocide as a backdrop to romance, the way some early fans fetishized it as a 'cute gay love story,' that it was not written by a Muslim, that it 'centers' privileged Americans, and that the villain is an ethnic Albanian, among other concerns" (ibid). Other readers then chimed in, causing the criticism to snowball. With the savaging of his book, Jackson became "demonized by the community he once helped police" (ibid).

Laura Moriarty, author of American Heart : Received backlash against her fifth novel, American Heart, concerning what the online critics described as a "problematic white-savior narrative" (Moriarty 2018: 67). The book, about an American girl trying to help a Muslim woman avoid Muslim-American detainment camps, received a starred review on Kirkus that was written by a Muslim woman. Kirkus later retracted the star in response to the online backlash and asked the reviewer to reflect on her language. The review now states, "It is problematic that Sadaf [the book's Muslim-woman main character] is seen only through the white protagonist's filter" (ibid).

Gareth Roberts : His contribution was removed from a Doctor Who anthology after past comments of his about trans people were shown to the book's publisher. Roberts is gay, but not trans (Benedictus 2019).

Amélie Wen Zhao, author of Blood Heir : Zhao said her novel-which addresses a theme of slavery-was written from her "immediate cultural perspective" as an immigrant from China to the United States. Online critics, however, accused Zhao's book of promoting "anti-blackness and blatant bigotry." The groundswell of criticism prompted Zhao to request that her publisher cancel publication of her novel (Flood 2019). Zhao's novel was released "five months after its original street date" (Kirch 2019:14).

"Objective" data also includes the demographic makeup of publishing, and the percentage of books published each year that feature diverse protagonists. Both of these are mentioned by this paper among "Challenges to Greater Diversity."

SUBJECTIVE THEMES
A variety of themes are conveyed and addressed in the articles I read. Some articles address more than one of the themes I've listed below. They include:

Accuracy of representation
"Diversity in books seems easy," according to Jennifer Baker, creator of the podcast Minorities in Publishing and member of We Need Diverse Books. "They're getting books with this content. But they're not making sure this content is respectful, responsible, and accurate" (Barack 2016).

In an interview with Bittner, author Kosoko Jackson argues for the importance of "intersectional diversity." "I wanted to write a book where queer Black boys could see themselves as nuanced characters with the same emotional arc, attractiveness, and moral questions white characters always get to experience in YA" (Bittner 2019:72).

Concerning their infographic, which is shown on this report's cover page, Huyck and Dahlen call attention to their decision to crack sections of the minority children's mirrors. "[W]e wanted this infographic to show not just the low quantity of existing literature, but also the inaccuracy and uneven quality of some of those books" (Huyck 2019).

Reese challenges an idea by Guardian journalist James Dawson, that the "best way to encourage diversity in fiction is to simply purchase more books featuring diverse characters and use social media channels to recommend said titles." Reese responds that "the mirrors that Native kids get in classic, popular, and award-winning books" are distorted and inaccurate - and, as such, need to be challenged.

"We have to call out these distortions, and you should, too. Lift books that give kids accurate representations of Native people, but call out the ones that are not ok, too, so that your buds will know those books are not ok. So they won't be put onto those school reading lists" (Reese 2015).

Adult-driven drama
Teens, who make up the "core audience" of Young Adult publishing, "are getting fed up with the constant, largely adult-driven dramas that currently dominate YA. Some have taken to discussing books via backchannels or on teen-exclusive hashtags - or defecting to other platforms, like YouTube or Instagram, which aren't so given over to mob dynamics" (Rosenfield 2017).

Hoist on his own petard?
Graham examines Kosoko Jackson's membership in an "intense" online community that "scolded writers who ran afoul" of the community's values. Graham relates that Jackson has now been "demonized by the community he once helped police." As a result, Jackson and Amélie Wen Zhao are both "people of color who now see their careers hobbled in an industry that claims to be laser-focused on diversity" (Graham 2019). Singal points out that what's especially interesting about the controversy around Jackson's book is that Jackson had been an outspoken critic of the book by Zhao (Singal 2019:61).

'Permission' to write about marginalized characters
In a conversation via email between interviewer Lisa Deaderick with Jean Guerrero, author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir; and Nicole Johnson, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, Johnson expressed that:

"Every writer has the freedom to write the characters and stories they want to write. With that freedom comes a responsibility to authentically present their characters and settings when it is outside of their own personal experience. Further, being able to engage and respond to the diversity of reactions and feedback that will come when the story is published, will demonstrate the author's commitment to honoring the perspectives of those with lived experience" (Deaderick 2020).

Graham cites a 2016 survey by Bowker Market Research of book-publishing employees, which documented that the industry "as a whole is still extremely, extremely white." Graham argues that "A reckoning with these abysmal numbers and their impact is overdue," but that instead, "we've gotten an increasingly toxic online culture around YA literature, with evermore-baroque standards for who can write about whom under what circumstances" (Graham 2019).

Cheaney argues that:

"All good literature broadens experience, whether it takes the reader to the Russian steppes, apartheid-era South Africa, or Regency England. A dogmatic insistence on a particular context pits cultures against each other. It also creates a class of literary cops who patrol the pages of upcoming releases and blow the whistle on 'incorrect' content" (Cheaney 2018:36).

Cheaney describes this trend as "diversity-for-its-own-sake," and claims that it is especially pronounced in Young Adult literature.

Qualifications of reviewers
In her 2019 study, Moreillon argues that librarians must be "culturally competent" in order to "purchase, provide, and present authentic and accurate children's and young adult literature," and that "librarians who serve as reviewers for children's and young adult book review sources must practice cultural competence as they read" (Moreillon 2019:3).

Waldman notes that "People of color face economic and racial barriers to breaking into the [publishing] industry .... The result is that the people who are most qualified to weigh in on a text's treatment of marginalized identities are often the least likely to do so" (Waldman 2019). According to Waldman:

"A group of unpaid readers - one with an undeniable personal investment in the Y.A. community - seems to be doing much of the work of critique that is usually first the task of agents and editors, and then that of booksellers and critics. But, when these particular readers do that work, they are derided as pitchfork-wielding hysterics" (Waldman 2019).

'Toxic' online community
Singal acknowledges commendable motivation behind efforts to diversify publishing, but argues that the online world of Young Adult fiction is a "case study in toxic Internet culture" (Singal 2019:59).

According to Rosenfield, YA Twitter "regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic." (Rosenfield defines "problematic" as "an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations.")

"Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues' work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that's as passionate about social justice as it is about reading" (Rosenfield 2017).

Senior argues that rabid pile-ons against recent YA books are by people who have not read them, and that an early "intemperate, if highly impassioned review" of Jackson's A Place for Wolves might have remained only "a pan from a citizen critic" if the Twitter subculture that's "obsessed with Y.A. fiction" had not noticed the review (Senior 2019).

Twitter's effect on publishing
Senior predicts that "If Twitter controls publishing, we'll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors" (Senior 2019).

Singal argues that the "right" response to the cancelling of Jackson's book is to consider how this "pattern" will affect other works in future (Singal 2019:62).

According to Rosenfield, some authors are tailoring their writing to avoid potential backlash. One author "scrapped a work in progress that featured a POC character, citing a sense shared by many publishing insiders that to write outside one's own identity as a white author simply isn't worth the inevitable backlash. "I was told, do not write that," she said. "I was told, 'Spare yourself'" (Rosenfield 2017).

Whose voice is amplified by publishers?
In their conversation with Deaderick, Jean Guerrero and Nicole Johnson conveyed that, while it's not necessary for a writer to have the "lived experience of a group they're attempting to represent," they expressed concern that, in the case of American Dirt (a novel marketed to adults, not YA, which was published in January 2020), a white woman's book was "elevated above stories" written by novelists who share backgrounds with the characters that Jeanine Cummins depicted in her book (Deaderick 2020).

DISCUSSION
Literature in trade magazines and print journalism tends to focus on recent examples of "cancel culture," citing perhaps two or three instances. I could not locate documentation of exactly how many authors have been affected by pile-ons, although a couple of articles mentioned subjects' reluctance to be interviewed out of fear of being targeted by backlash. Other articles mention authors' tailoring their work or deciding to abandon certain subjects or protagonists.

It's also interesting to note that, while some books were indeed "cancelled," others were only postponed and still others were released on-schedule. It can even be argued that, in some cases, books were improved - as writers mitigated portrayals in their books that were inaccurate and stereotypical.

Ideas for follow-up inquiry include: what factors allow some authors, but not others, to successfully "weather the storm"? What about authors' willingness to write, and publishers' willingness to publish, books with diverse characters? Will "cancel culture" help, or hinder, books by #OwnVoices authors? And how much influence will non-professional reviewers wield when the fields of publishing and professional reviews become successfully more diversified? Will their reach, and their potential to incite online pile-ons, be diminished or eliminated? I'm interested in continuing to follow this subject as part of my personal and professional interest in efforts to diversify publishing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Aronson, K. M., Callahan, B.D., and O'Brien, A.S. (2018). "Messages Matter: Investigating the Thematic Content of Picture Books Portraying Underrepresented Racial and Cultural Groups." Sociological Forum, Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2018: Pages 165-185.

Barack, L. (2016.) "'When We Was Fierce' Pulled as Demand Grows for More #OwnVoices Stories." School Library Journal, Aug. 13, 2016. Retrieved March 31, 2020. (https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=when-we-was-fierce-pulled-as-demand-grows-for-more-ownvoices-stories)

Benedictus, L. (2019). "Torn apart: the vicious war over young adult books." The Guardian, June 15, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2020. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/15/torn-apart-the-vicious-war-over-young-adult-books)

Bishop, R.S. (2015). "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." Reading is Fundamental, Jan. 3, 2015. Reprinted from Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, Vol. 6, No. 3, Summer 1990. Retrieved March 1, 2020. (https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf)

Bittner, R. (2019). "Talking with Kosoko Jackson." Booklist, Feb. 1, 2019: Page 72.

Cheaney, J.B. (2018). "Age of Outrage: Have diversity police created a culture of censorship?" World Magazine, Feb. 17, 2018: Pages 36, 37.

Deaderick, L. (2020). "'American Dirt' leads to conversations about representation and diversity in storytelling, publishing." San Diego Union Tribune, Feb. 23, 2020. Retrieved Feb. 23, 2020. (https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/columnists/story/2020-02-23/american-dirt-leads-to-conversations-about-representation-and-diversity-in-storytelling-publishing)

Flood, A. (2019). "Young Adult author cancels own novel after race controversy." The Guardian, Feb. 1, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 22, 2020. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/01/young-adult-author-cancels-own-novel-after-race-controversy)

Graham, R. (2019). "Wolves: A YA sensitivity reader watched his own community kill his debut novel before it was ever released." Slate, March 4, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 30, 2020. (https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/ya-book-scandal-kosoko-jackson-a-place-for-wolves-explained.html)

Huyck, D. and Dahlen, S.P. (2019). "Picture This: Diversity in Children's Books 2018 Infographic." SarahPark.com. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC), School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp. Retrieved March 1, 2020. (https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/.)

Kirch, C. (2019). "Responding to Criticism: Booksellers weigh in on the postponement and cancellation of titles by publishers after early readers express concern." Publishers Weekly, June 17, 2019: Pages 14,15.

Lee and Low. (2020). "Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Baseline Survey Results." The Open Book Blog, Jan. 28, 2020. Retrieved Feb. 3, 2020. (https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/)

Maher, J. (2019). "PW Superstar Jenn Baker on Diversity in Publishing." Publishers Weekly, Sept. 23, 2019, Pages 10-11.

Mason, E. (2019). "This book is racist damaging rewritten." Washington Post, March 19, 2018. Retrieved March 31, 2020. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/entertainment/books/keira-drake-the-continent-book-comparisons/)

Moreillon, J. (2019). "Does Cultural Competence Matter? Book Reviewers as Mediators of Children's Literature." Children and Libraries, Spring 2019: Pages 3-8.

Moriarty, L. (2018). "My Account: On being deemed 'problematic.'" Wired, February 2018: Page 67.

Reese, D. (2015). "An Open Letter to People Who Are Not 'Fans' of 'Call Out Culture' on Social Media." American Indians in Children's Literature, Oct. 13, 2015. Retrieved Jan. 26, 2020. (https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2015/10/an-open-letter-to-people-who-are-not.html)

Rosenfield, K. (2017). "The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter." Vulture, August 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2020. (https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html)

Senior, J. (2019). "Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture: Readers, not a Twitter mob, should decide the fate of a book." New York Times, March 8, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 26, 2020. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/teen-fiction-and-the-perils-of-cancel-culture.html)

Singal, J. (2019). "Teen Fiction Twitter is Eating Its Young." Reason, June 2019: Pages 58-63.

Waldman, K. (2019). "In Y.A., Where is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?" The New Yorker, March 21, 2019. Retrieved Jan. 26, 2020. (https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture)

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'Cancel culture' and diversity in children's and Young Adult publishing

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This semester, for SOC 2 at Santa Rosa Junior College, I compiled a Literature Review that examines: How does "cancel culture" affect efforts toward greater diversity in children's and Young Adult publishing? INTRODUCTION: Among authors, readers, librarians, educators, and others, a grassroots social movement seeks greater diversity in literature for children and young adults.

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April Yang:
I chose this article because it provided me with a very detailed definition of cancel culture and information about several reasons why it affects children's literature, specifically in Dr. Suess books. The article also gave specific information as to why each reason was important to consider. Cancel culture is ideally new but the concept is the same. One quote that really stood out to me throughout this article was, “This either/or thinking is actually an element of white supremacy culture, and it’s meant to divide, Weaver said. So, if we continue to perpetuate that through this cancel culture narrative, we’re going to continue to stay divided” (Weaver). The idea of racial portrayals through cancel culture creates disparities through an innocent author whose work was meant to encourage acceptance and understanding. It saddens me that some Dr. Suess books are discontinuing as I grew up reading them most of my childhood. Though of course racism is not okay, I feel that we as a community still need to stay aware so that more understanding can grow through people stepping out of their comfort zone to experience different people and cultures.

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So far, the Cat in the Hat and the Grinch and Sam-I-Am have avoided the fate of some of their counterparts in the Dr. Seuss universe, that charmed place where rainy days dissolve into housebound chaos, hearts suddenly grow three sizes and green eggs turn out to taste good after all.

In an age of growing sensitivity to racial portrayals in media, past and present, the move was hailed by some but excoriated by others who declared another instance of "cancel culture" claiming an innocent victim, in this case an author whose work by and large preaches tolerance and understanding.

But to say so raises a knotty question: What exactly is cancel culture? It seems to be invoked by everyone who sees a threat to a favored person or cultural artifact. Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, much in the news these days as he faces multiple sexual harassment allegations, declared himself a victim in rejecting calls to resign.

The phrase is new. The concept isn't. It used to be called political correctness, said Sigal Ben-Porath, professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, who described it as "a better branding of the same thing."

"Basically, there's the effort to clean the public sphere from views that some people find to be inappropriate, hateful, bigoted," she said.

The phrase "cancel culture" is typically used in a pejorative way to describe a variety of actions - forcing controversial speakers to cancel lectures, also called "deplatforming," removing statues and other memorials from public places, or ganging up on some person or cause on social media.

Because the term has been so widely used, it's been rendered almost meaningless, Ben-Porath said. But by any definition, the decision to discontinue the Dr. Seuss books doesn't really fit, she said.

"If you want to read 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street' to your children, are you still allowed to do it? Of course you are," she said. "They [the Seuss estate] own the rights, the manuscript. Dr. Seuss is not being canceled. Some of his works are not being promoted anymore. It's a very different thing."

Indeed, said Kirsten Hess, owner of Let's Play Books in Emmaus, Seuss remains a bestselling author, but for works that encapsulate his message without tapping into offensive racial tropes. She said putting aside a handful of books to address the hurt caused to some readers was appropriate.

"Canceling Seuss is not what happened at all," she said. "Months previously, [Seuss Enterprises] decided not to print those titles anymore because they listened to people - what an idea!"

In a sign of how poorly the move went over in some quarters, however, Hess received an avalanche of requests for the books when the news hit the media. Most appeared to be from people who weren't interested in the books themselves but were making a statement against the decision.

She explained that she didn't stock the books - which are already fetching exorbitant prices on eBay - and wouldn't fill orders for them.

"The people we spoke to on the phone were angry and thinking Seuss was going away permanently, that it was the beginning of the end," Hess said. "No one that ordered on the website or called had ever been a customer. I think that's telling."

Consider a few episodes that have attracted the cancel culture label:

Chris Harrison, longtime host of ABC's "The Bachelor," played down a contestant's past attendance at a party with an "antebellum" theme. After an uproar, he apologized and stepped away from his role. The risk of glorifying the Southern slave-holding era also prompted two bands to change their names, albeit on their own initiative rather than through pressure - The Dixie Chicks became The Chicks, while Lady Antebellum became Lady A.

Late-night host Jimmy Fallon faced calls for cancellation during the 2016 presidential campaign for playfully tousling Donald Trump's hair during an interview - a move that "normalized" the controversial Republican candidate, critics charged. Fallon's ratings suffered, but he survived the episode and remains on the air.

Maple syrup brand Aunt Jemima was rebranded because it evoked the stereotype of a subservient black woman.

The cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew was cut from the movie "Space Jam 2″ because his relentless pursuit of the opposite sex, with its unsolicited hugs and kisses, was seen as normalizing rape culture.

After years of pressure, the Washington NFL franchise, long known as the Redskins - a racially charged term for indigenous Americans - became "The Washington Football Team." The team is expected to select a new name this year.

A better example of cancelling is when some average Joe makes an inappropriate comment online and gets fired over it after public outcry. On Twitter, users often invoke the phrase "Twitter, do your thing" to unleash the mob on some insensitive poster. The effect is that the offender is ejected from the culture through a sort of cybershunning.

That's a harsh and often unfair experience. But there's value in examining changes to the way boundaries are drawn around what's socially acceptable, Ben-Porath said.

For example, the hype around Dr. Seuss "could be a sign that like our society is becoming less racist, that we're really zeroing in on how communities, especially communities of color, have been marginalized in popular media," she said.

This transformation has been happening for a long time. Some Bugs Bunny cartoons quietly disappeared from the airwaves because of racially charged depictions of people of color. Out of sensitivity to domestic violence victims, Jackie Gleason's classic sitcom "The Honeymooners" was edited to remove the "bang, zoom" scenes where he threatens to send his wife to the moon with a punch.

"I think that's the conversation we're having about who and what we value and who and what we honor, and which books we want to read our children," Ben-Porath said. "Having an open conversation about that and pushing back from one side to the other. I think it's just a good and lively and acceptable part of the democratic debate."

The best way to understand the movement is to talk to people who have felt the sting of the stereotype, the caricature, the insensitive comment.

Noreen Yamamoto Sherry, a Japanese-American resident of Lower Macungie Township, is keenly aware of the impact of Asian stereotypes. Sherry said she loves Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," but was appalled when she saw the film, in which Mickey Rooney's plays a myopic, bucktoothed caricature of a Japanese man for comic relief.

Not every depiction struck her the same way. When she read about offensive drawings of Asians in "And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" - the best-known of the Seuss books in question - she had to look them up.

"As a kid it didn't make a huge impression," she said. "But obviously it's dated and offensive."

Sherry has seen worse from the pen of Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. During World War II, he produced propaganda cartoons. One, intended to drum up support for the internment policy he fiercely supported, depicts a Japanese man in a booth labeled "Honorable 5th Column" handing out boxes of TNT to a long line of Japanese people from West Coast states. The caption reads "Waiting for the Signal from Home."

Geisel had a considerable change of heart after a 1953 visit to Hiroshima, where the terrible destruction of the 1945 atomic bombing was still starkly evident. The fruit of that visit was "Horton Hears a Who," in which an elephant discovers and protects the denizens of a microscopic world called Whoville. The book, with its famous line "A person's a person, no matter how small," was an allegory about mending relations with the Japanese and valuing them as equals.

In that story, Sherry finds hope that the noise surrounding cancel culture can give way to reasoned conversation.

"It's a real hot term right now," she said. "It makes people paranoid and feel like it's only a matter of time before they get in trouble for something I say. But I hope we can keep discussing this stuff and seeing things from the other side. We're a melting pot and that's what we have to do."

Cancel culture comes up during "cultural humility" training at the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, said Robyn Weaver, program manager for the Campaign for Racial & Ethnic Justice. It's regarded as an unhelpful term and concept.

"It's like good-bad binary," Weaver said. "So there's no room for any gray area. It's either you're good or you're bad. And that's the end of the conversation. It also serves as a method of deflecting from having that deeper dialogue."

The practice is also based on virtue-signaling, with people positioning themselves on a certain side of a debate, she explained. But that's also problem.

"This either/or thinking is actually an element of white supremacy culture, and it's meant to divide," Weaver said. "So, if we continue to perpetuate that through this cancel culture narrative, we're going to continue to stay divided."

And even though cancel culture was created and continues to proliferate through social media, the divisions it creates won't be mended there.

Instead, Weaver suggests, bridges can be built between communities and more understanding can grow through people stepping out of their comfort zones to experience different people, spaces and cultures.

But pivoting a catchy, alliterative hashtag like "cancel culture" from a two-sided issue to a more fluid discussion is a daunting task.

"Honestly, if I had a hashtag, it would be 'look up,'" Weaver said when asked how she would signal a pause for context in place of a call to cancel a person or piece of media. "Because, you know, there's obviously a narrative and agendas at play related to cancel culture, and that narrative and agenda aren't necessarily coming from the people near you, the people in your community, but from corporations, from politicians, from people in positions of power that are trying to further an agenda."

And as cancel culture is just the newest iteration of a practice that's been around for decades, it's important to stay aware, slowing knee-jerk, emotional reactions to explore the context.

"There's always going to be people trying to push a narrative, sell their products, oppress others, and the devices that are used to do those things that similar, but with different names and different methods," Weaver said. "So that's also just kind of an important thing to be aware of, which is why I'm saying look up, right? Because this is bigger than this moment and the two words cancel culture."

Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.

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Is decision to discontinue some Dr. Seuss books latest example of cancel culture, or is it a sign we're becoming 'less racist?'

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The withdrawal of several Dr. Seuss titles because of offensive imagery has sparked another battle in the culture wars. Putting aside a handful of his books to address the hurt caused to some readers was appropriate, though the cancel culture often does more harm than good, some Lehigh Valley observers say.

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Rosanna Davila:
This video is by a 'pop culture breaking news' channel about children book authors who have publicly cancel themselves before the internet cancels them. The authors talked about in this video are canceling themselves out of fear of losing their career. They are scared that, as said in the video "[they are not] complying with the latest norm”. I agree with this video and feel bad for the authors. The world has gotten extremely polarized; there is only black and white and if your opinion is gray in any way, you will be burn. One of the authors (around min 4) asked bookstores to pull their books out because non-Japanese individuals thought the illustrations were based on stereotypes because the girl in the book is wearing a Japanese outfit. According to the video, the publisher who has Asian heritage considered the book “celebratory and fun” and identify with the character. The author is too scared of being cancelled as a human being and chooses to cancel his book before extremists cancel him. I think cancel culture is becoming extremist and a dogma in itself. There are universal unforgivable crimes like sexual abuse or blunt bigotry that requires to cancel that human being no matter how good or bad their writing is. But humans are more complex than black and white. If drawing a character with Asian-inspired clothes is offensive for non-Asian humans, we need to reevaluate how to engage in civilized dialogue.

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Children's Book Author CANCELS HIMSELF Before Twitter Does it For Him?!

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When thinking about call in, call out, or cancel I get stuck between call out and cancel because I feel call out is necessary to point out the things that are wrong because it important to voice your opinions in a manner of being an activist. If someone notices that something is wrong its important to point it out. On the other hand on cancelling culture I feel it just quits everyone from making a change. Sometimes this can be beneficial because voicing opinion can create a controversy of the topic. It aggravate people and cause them to become negativity about the topic. Reading the Dr. Seus article creates issues for me because I used to love reading those books because they were funny to me. As a kid I didn't notice the controversies that were shown but its scary to see literature growing in a manner of being racist.

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Zinnia Tran:

This article is from the artshub website, which goes into an explanation why the recall for Dr.Seuss's book is not prompted by cancel culture. With the recall of six of Dr. Seuss's books that contains racist caricatures and themes, many people have called out that cancel culture is affecting children's book by taking away books with memories and meaning in many people's childhood. Those people argue that there is no need to be canceling children's book, especially that of Dr Seuss who has been a well respected author in the field. The article argues, however, that no one is "cancelling" Dr Seuss. Their statement is that Dr Seuss's book were written in a time with significant racial issues, and it is only appropriate to recall the books containing racist caricatures and themes in a time that is now more enlighten and aware about racial injustices. The article also adds that children's books are among those most often to be banned or censored, even without cancel culture. It is only appropriate that the books that children read should include diversity and free of racist themes that would affect their social perceptions of other groups. Although many view cancel culture is extreme, I believe it is also important to call out problematic books so that we can bring awareness and change. The article concludes by stating that "kids and teens, like adults, need to see themselves in the books they read, and young white readers need to see other cultural groups as something more than illegal, or violent, or criminal".

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Let's start by putting aside the bugbear that it is even possible to 'cancel' children's author Dr Seuss.

As Philip Bump wrote yesterday in The Washington Post:

'No one is 'cancelling' Dr Seuss. The author, himself, is dead for one thing, which is about as cancelled as a person can get.'

Laying aside a multimillion-dollar publishing business, tattered copies of Dr Seuss books clutter children's bedrooms around the globe. Parents still grapple nightly with the tongue-twisters of Fox in Socks, Horton Hears a Who! or , and try their best to keep their eyes open through a 20th reading of Green Eggs and Ham.

However, on Tuesday (what would have been Dr Seuss's 117th birthday), the company that protects the late author's legacy announced its plan to halt publishing and licensing six (out of more than 60) Dr Seuss books.

Few would know some of the discontinued titles, like McElligot's Pool and The Cat's Quizzer. However, many will recognise If I Ran the Zoo and And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, which have been criticised for racist caricatures and themes of cultural dominance and dehumanisation.

In If I Ran the Zoo, young Gerald McGrew builds a 'Bad-Animal Catching Machine' to capture a turbaned Arab for his exhibit of ' unusual beasts '.

'People will stare,' Gerald marvels, 'And they'll say, 'What a sight!'. Chinese 'helpers' with 'eyes at a slant' hunt exotic creatures in the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant.

A reading recorded for Dr Seuss Day in 2019, removes the racist taunt. Instead of helpers who 'wear their eyes at a slant', the helpers 'all wear such very cool pants'.

Nevertheless, pervasive racial imagery and subservient typecasting remain. That doesn't mean Dr Seuss books should - or can - be scrapped altogether. Instead, these books present an opportunity to build awareness and teach young readers about history and context.

Censorship in children's titles

Children's books are among those most often banned or censored. In this case, removing the Dr Seuss titles recognises that he was writing in a time and place when racial stereotyping was commonplace and frequently the focus of humour.

Elsewhere, controversy over golliwogs as racist caricatures was confrontingly played out in Enid Blyton's Noddy stories. In her original telling of In the Dark, Dark Wood, Noddy is carjacked by three golliwogs who trap him, strip him naked, and leave him crying. 'You bad, wicked golliwogs!' Noddy says. 'How dare you steal my things!'

Similarly, in the first edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas are African pygmies who have been 'rescued' by Willy Wonka and enslaved in his factory. When Charlie says, 'But there must be people working there,' Grandpa Joe responds, 'Not people, Charlie. Not ordinary people, anyway.'

Read: The many Australias in our graphic novels

In his political cartoons, which appeared in a New York newspaper in the early 1940s, Dr Seuss ran the gamut of racist depictions, from African-American people as monkeys to Japanese characters with yellow faces and "rice paddy" hats.

In the now-suspended The Cat's Quizzer, there is 'a Japanese' depicted in conical hat and stereotypical dress. On Mulberry Street, a Chinese man with bright yellow skin wears geta shoes and carries a bowl of rice.

In early editions, the caption underneath reads 'A Chinaman who eats with sticks'. In 1978, over 40 years after the book was first published, the character's skin tone and braid were changed. The caption was changed from 'Chinaman' to 'Chinese man'.

If I ran the library ... by today's standards

Dr Seuss's work contains racism and xenophobia, but should we judge him by today's standards?

Children's literature has always been subject to socio-historical shifts. It is a product of its time and the context in which it is created. Viewed through the changing lens of history, childhood itself is an unstable concept.

In other words, it is impossible to separate children's literature from the ideological structure of our world, and from the particular historical moment in which it is produced.

While Dr Seuss's best-loved characters - the Cat in the Hat, Horton the elephant, the Grinch - have earned their place in the canon, what we should be concerned about is the question of diversity in children's literature.

We know from numerous studies that white children dominate children's books, with talking animals and trains outnumbering the representations of First Nations, Asian, African and other minority groups.

No quick fixes

Although never perfect, other beloved children's literature series have sought solutions to similar dilemmas.

Enid Blyton's stories have been continuously revised since the 1990s. Noddy is now carjacked by goblins, and, in the Faraway Tree series, Dame Snap replaces Dame Slap, with Fanny and Dick getting a makeover as Frannie and Rick.

More recently, Richard Scarry's books were updated to depict Daddies cooking and Mummies going to work, while the latest film adaptation of The Witches cast actor of colour Jahzir Bruno as the boy protagonist.

Not surprisingly, queer representation in young adult fiction is still problematic, with most queer stories authored by writers who do not identify as queer.

On one level, the decision to discontinue half a dozen Dr Seuss books because ' they are hurtful and wrong' seems a simple gesture (and one with relatively small financial impact). Racism permeates the Dr Seuss catalogue, including The Cat in the Hat's origins in blackface minstrel performances. Like Dr Seuss's Yertle, it's turtles all the way down.

Instead, finding meaningful ways to contextualise these historical aspects for young readers today might be a better focus, rather than withholding a few and letting more prominent titles slide by.

Kids and teens, like adults, need to see themselves in the books they read, and young white readers need to see other cultural groups as something more than illegal, or violent, or criminal.

As children's literature expert Perry Nodelman notes: 'Stories structure us as beings in the world'. In the same week a Lowy study found one in five Chinese Australians have been threatened or attacked, it could not be more important to invest in an inclusive future for our kids.

Kate Cantrell, Lecturer in Writing, Editing, and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland and Sharon Bickle, Lecturer in English Literature, QLD rep for Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Scrapping six Dr Seuss books is not cancel culture | ArtsHub Australia

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Let's start by putting aside the bugbear that it is even possible to 'cancel' children's author Dr Seuss. As Philip Bump wrote yesterday in The Washington Post: 'No one is 'cancelling' Dr Seuss. The author, himself, is dead for one thing, which is about as cancelled as a person can get.'

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Wendy Salgado:
I chose this article because it has many great points about "cancel culture" and completely removing books from libraries or classrooms. One of the points that the author makes is that books like the six Dr. Seuss books that were canceled should not be completely removed from classrooms. The author also explains that these books can be used to help guide discussions into why these books are problematic and give students a different perspective of the stereotypes that are shown in the books. I believe that this is a good point because it might be hard to have these conversations in classrooms and having materials and resources can be very helpful. The author also states that there are many books that have the same writing elements as the Dr. Seuss books that are more inclusive and that can be used in classrooms.

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Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of racist and insensitive imagery, per The Associated Press, sparking backlash among some fans and media who blame "cancel culture." Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced the move on Dr. Seuss's birthday and Read Across America Day because the books "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

The discontinued books: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," "McElligot's Pool," "On Beyond Zebra!," "Scrambled Eggs Super!" and "The Cat's Quizzer." The criticism refers to the way Black people, Asian people and others are drawn in some of the works.

One University of Alabama professor agrees with the move but says the books should not be banned. Instead, he encourages parents and teachers to move away from Dr. Seuss books and instead use other titles to teach reading skills.

"Older, classic children's books such as those by Dr. Seuss, while well-loved, are often imbued with covert and sometimes very overt racist imagery and messages," said Jamie Campbell Naidoo, the Foster-EBSCO Endowed professor in UA's School of Library and Information Studies, in a UA statement.

Naidoo's research interests include library services to diverse populations and diversity in children's and young adult media. He teaches courses in public librarianship, children's literature, storytelling, and materials and services to children, young adults, families, and diverse populations.

"Given that children develop an understanding of themselves, others, and the world around them from the media that they consume, it is imperative that they encounter stories free of images and messages that perpetuate stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings," he said. "The Dr. Seuss books have been used for years to teach children how to read, but they also contain hurtful imagery that reinforces stereotypes of many ethnic and racial groups."

Naidoo said there are plenty of "beautiful, engaging books, representing all types of cultural diversity" available for children, books that celebrate diversity and encourage children to respect each other. "The time has come for parents, caregivers, librarians, and teachers to embrace these titles and move away from the Dr. Seuss books," he said.

He specifically said libraries should not ban the books, nor should teachers remove them from classrooms, but they cannot share the titles without taking time to talk about why they are hurtful.

There have been books in our lifetime that have been banned or challenged by schools, some for sharing qualities like this that are hurtful to young people who may not grasp the full scope of the contents. Alabama native Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," while widely regarded as a classic, has been banned or challenged in some schools and libraries for its mentions of sexuality and rape, and use of the N-word. We may even see more books under the microscope soon, including what are widely considered classics. AL.com followed up with Naidoo to ask why are texts like this might remain important from a historical or literary standpoint and what educational purpose do works that might have insensitive material serve.

"From a historical standpoint, they do provide educational opportunities to examine how social views have (or haven't) progressed over time," Naidoo said via email. "They open up an opportunity to discuss why an illustrator created a particular racist image, exploring social and political views of the time. At the same time, they give an opportunity for students to put themselves in the shoes of someone from another culture group and ask, 'How would I feel if I saw that stereotyped image of someone from my cultural group?' This is an experience some children have never considered."

He said, for example, a child who is not Asian American most likely has never spent much time considering what it is like to see book characters that "look like you" with yellow skin and slanted lines for eyes. "That child has mostly likely never had that disconnected or hot, shameful, embarrassed feeling when another classmate tries to imitate those eyes," he said.

"To be clear, culturally insensitive materials have educational value but they must not replace newer, quality books with more realistic and accurate cultural portrayals. Children need to have conversations about the problematic elements of the books, otherwise they internalize that it is okay to draw racist imagery."

The move has also sparked backlash from a very loud contingent of people, both private citizens and prominent cable news media figures, railing against "cancel culture" now coming for Dr. Seuss in a would-be collective tyrannical onslaught, attempting to point out the hypocrisy from high profile Democrats like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris for praising Seuss works.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey is even pushing back against criticism of the Seuss works just days after reading one of the author's books online as part of "Read Across America." In a statement to AL.com, Ivey spokesperson Gina Maiola said, "Gov. Ivey believes that there is no place for "cancel culture" in our country. Instead of worrying about telling kids it is wrong to read Dr. Seuss, let's worry about getting them back in the classroom."

"To call the discontinuation of some of Dr. Seuss's titles cancel culture is a stretch," Naidoo said. "Can you cancel someone who is deceased? Is it really cancel culture if Dr. Seuss's own estate is ending the publication of these books? Are all of his books being taken out of circulation from libraries or pulped in book stores? No."

He said many of the books are still available for purchase, and libraries will still have his books.

"The Seuss Estate choosing to discontinue titles that are racist isn't cancel culture," he said. "They are acknowledging that times have changed and finally realizing that racist images of Africans and Asians is not acceptable. The term 'cancel culture' is being used more often lately to be synonymous with anything that is changed. Long before 'cancel culture' was being used, parents and educators realized that some of Dr. Seuss's images were not appropriate and reinforced stereotypes."

He said the dialogue about Seuss's books being problematic has been happening for decades, and the timing of the decision by the estate has nothing to do with cancel culture, that they are merely responding to views that have been expressed for years and made public their decision more recently to coincide with Read Across America and Dr. Seuss's birthday.

"Some adults will say, 'But I read these books as a kid (or to my own kids) and I love them.' You can appreciate something but also realize it has flaws," Naidoo said. "To put this in another context, you might have a relative that makes racist comments. While you love your family member, you don't want them saying those things in front of your children."

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Discontinuing racist books isn't 'cancel culture', UA prof says

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Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of racist and insensitive imagery, per The Associated Press, sparking backlash among some fans and media who blame "cancel culture." Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced the move on Dr. Seuss's birthday and Read Across America Day because the books "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

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Alberto Hernandez:

Hello class I selected this article one of  the iconic character of Looney Toons, Speedy Gonzales. Recently the public have called for the cancellation of this character due to what the article states "helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans,”.  Watching this show on a regular basis I never received the impression that this character was a drunk or lethargic but rather he was a fast character that could get out of any trouble, Because of Speedy I was actually inspired to run track. I personally believed that shows from the past don't need to be canceled but rather have new shows that portray character how we as a society should be treating others.

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Cancel culture has come for Speedy Gonzales before - and the fastest mouse of Mexico survived - due in part because of the outpouring of support from the Mexican and Spanish communities.

Now it looks like the woke crowd is coming for the Looney Tunes character once again, with New York Times columnist Charles Blow writing the cartoon "helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans," in a column over the weekend.

In the same article, Mr. Blow took on the stinky skunk Pepe Le Pew for "normalizing rape culture," and as a result, Warner Bros, which will be releasing Space Jam 2 in the coming months, said Mr. Le Pew wouldn't be featured in the sequel.

The French were nowhere to be found defending Pepe Le Pew, however Latinos went into an uproar over the possibility Speedy Gonzales being canceled.

"I am the voice of Speedy Gonzales in the new Space Jam," comedian Gabriel Iglesias, whose family hails from Mexico, goes by the name Fluffy, and is voicing the mouse in the new film tweeted. "Does this mean they are gonna try to cancel Fluffy too? U can't catch me cancel culture. I'm the fastest mouse in all of Mexico."

Mr. Iglesias tweet has generated more than 25,000 likes and counting.

"As a Mexican... I freaking love Speedy Gonzalez as much as my family love the Fastest mouse in all of Mexico," tweeted Marisol Jaimes, responding to Mr. Iglesias's tweet, adding that "the toxic sjw gringos who tried to cancel Speedy Gonzalez" could do something unprintable to themselves.

"Neither me nor anyone amongst my family and friends in Mexico felt offended by Speedy Gonzales," tweeted the account named Hispanic Citizen. "He was intelligent, witty, the fastest of them all and would always outsmart his rivals. The sombreros? Many Mexicans wear them with pride every World Cup. I love Speedy."

It's not the first time the mouse has been targeted - and has survived due to the cascade of love shown on him from the Latino community.

In 1999, Speedy Gonzales was banned from the Cartoon Network after it decided the cartoon was too offensive and reinforced negative Mexican stereotypes like speaking in a heavy accent and wearing a sombrero. The network reinstated him three years later after fan outrage.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino anti-discrimination organization, helped get Speedy back on the air after Cartoon Network shelved him.

"In Mexico we grew up watching Speedy Gonzales," Eugenio Derbez, told Deadline at the time. "He was like a superhero to us, or maybe more like a revolucionario like Simón Bolívar or Pancho Villa."

In pondering his newest cancellation threat, Yolanda Machado, a writer at Remezcla, a Latin American media company serving the millennial market wrote although "Speedy Gonzales was created in racism and stereotypes, Latinos have dealt with 'representation' everywhere and have attached ourselves with the small pieces of us that we connected with. In turn, we created a Speedy Gonzales into our own hero, outsmarting the white folks, for over 50 years and counting."

And doesn't that make sense?

Speedy Gonzales was always the underdog hero, zooming around helping hungry Mexican mice get to cheese guarded by Sylvester, the gringo cat. Sylvester is constantly outsmarted and humiliated by the clever, funny, little mouse.

"As a Latino, I can state that we are not offended by Speedy Gonzales," EJ Miller tweeted in response to the new controversy. "He is a cultural icon and must be protected at all costs. The machismo. The drip. Protect him!"

Indeed, because of the flood of support - from the community Speedy Gonzales is most meant to offend - the fastest mouse in Mexico just may outrun cancel culture once again.

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Cancel Speedy Gonzales? Not so fast, Latinos say

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Cancel culture has come for Speedy Gonzales before - and the fastest mouse of Mexico survived - due in part because of the outpouring of support from the Mexican and Spanish communities.

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Vivian Nguyen:

I included this article because of the topic "cancel culture" being explained as it also demonstrates examples that we may not have thought of. The concept of cancel culture has been brought up more recently due to today's society and the bigger picture we see now. This article explained that it is in fact hard to cancel a dominant culture. Dr.Seuss books were taught in school and were "not censored, not banned, not illegal" (Strauss). These children books shaped the culture that are still being taught to today, despite the disheartening truth of racism. It is easy to "cancel" a certain culture, but it can also become toxic and almost "addicting". Strauss mentions that the author may not have intended it to be offensive and aware of the racist characters. I believe that cancel culture shouldn't end someone's career entirely, but to allow them to grow and learn from their mistakes.

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Natalia Casillas:
I chose to add this article because it shows examples of two authors, Kosoko Jackson and Amelie Wen Zhao, who publically acknowledged when their books were canceled. These authors received backlash from the Twitter community over problematic aspects of their novels: "A place for Wolves" by Kosoko Jackson, & "Blood Heir" by Amelie Wen Zhao. These authors publically issued apologies along with their novels' new (later) publication dates. This article not only gives examples of calling out and canceling of authors but it also defines how public internet canceling is different than criticism from established critics. On top of this, this article also gives different perspectives on people's opinions of cancel culture, from librarians to publishers. One aspect of this article that really caught my attention was Katy Waldman's research on why books that have problematic and insensitive aspects are still being published. She stated, "(the) people who are most qualified to weigh in on a text’s treatment of marginalized identities are often the least likely to do so." (Waldman) Waldman basically found that marginalized groups are less present in publishing companies. Lastly, the author of this article also interviewed a marketing manager who indicated that fear over cancel culture and not wanting to be called out can possibly lead publishers to cut down the number of diverse books that they publish. This opened my eyes to the negative consequences representative/ inclusive children's books might face because of cancel culture.

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Late last month, the author Kosoko Jackson withdrew the publication of his début young-adult novel, "A Place for Wolves," which had been slated for a March 26th release. The book, which follows two American boys as they fall in love against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, had garnered advance praise ("a tension-filled war setting, beautiful young love, family strength and all heart," one blurb enthused). It also had the imprimatur of the #ownvoices hashtag, in which the main characters of a book share a marginalized identity with the writer-Jackson is black and queer. But a disparaging Goodreads review, which took issue with Jackson's treatment of the war and his portrayal of Muslims, had a snowball effect, particularly on Twitter. Eventually, Jackson tweeted a letter of apology to "the Book Community," stating, "I failed to fully understand the people and the conflict that I set around my characters. I have done a disservice to the history and to the people who suffered."

The Jackson fracas came just weeks after another début Y.A. author, Amélie Wen Zhao, pulled her novel before it was published, also due to excoriating criticisms of it on Twitter and Goodreads. The book, a fantasy tale called "Blood Heir," depicts an empire that enslaves magical minorities, known as Affinites, and where "oppression is blind to skin color," as the promotional material phrased it. Critics felt that Zhao's slavery narrative had erased a specifically African-American experience, and they objected to a scene in which an apparently black slave girl dies in an apparently white character's arms, in an act of self-sacrifice. Zhao, who emigrated from China when she was eighteen, said that her book drew on "the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country."

Like Jackson, Zhao tweeted an apology to "the Book Community," writing, "It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community, particularly those for whom I seek to write and empower. As such, I have decided to ask my publisher not to publish 'Blood Heir' at this time."

Jackson and Zhao are peers-both members of a Facebook group, the Novel Nineteens, for kid-lit and Y.A. creators publishing their débuts in 2019. Ironically, Jackson was one of the louder voices speaking out against Zhao; also ironically, he has worked as a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers, vetting manuscripts featuring characters from marginalized communities. "Now, Jackson has been demonized by the community he once helped police," the writer Ruth Graham noted in Slate.

Even casual observers of Y.A. controversies might have seen the Jackson and Zhao incidents, coming so close together, as an acceleration of an already established trend. In 2017, Keira Drake pushed back the release date of her début, " The Continent," when a groundswell of Twitter critics accused the book of racism. That same year, Laurie Forest's Y.A. fantasy début, " The Black Witch," likewise became the object of intense scrutiny, weeks ahead of its publication, after detractors slammed it as a white-savior tale. The writer Kat Rosenfield's New York magazine piece " The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter," which centered on the "Black Witch" outcry, revealed that many of Forest's fiercest critics had not read her novel, and others conflated the perspectives of racist characters with that of the author herself. (The review that set off the cancel campaign against "The Black Witch," by the blogger and bookseller Shauna Sinyard, "consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book's racist characters saying or doing racist things," Rosenfield wrote.)

The Y.A. world is often credibly depicted as a censorious, woker-than-thou hothouse, and never more vividly than in Rosenfield's piece; the article has become a Rosetta stone for anyone seeking purchase on Y.A.'s callout-and-cancel culture. The community gadfly and bête noire Jesse Singal's recap of the Zhao controversy in Tablet carried the headline "How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author's Budding Career." "From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience," Graham wrote in Slate. The Times commissioned two first-person essays, one by Drake, on the "shameful stain" of these eruptions and the "tyrannical coddling of overly sensitive readers."

"What happened to Jackson is frightening," the author Jennifer Senior wrote, also in the Times. "Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power." "A Place for Wolves," Senior continued, "should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first."

Senior is right that the ongoing Y.A. wars are about power-about who has traditionally wielded power in publishing, and how that balance is shifting, for better or worse. A group of unpaid readers-one with an undeniable personal investment in the Y.A. community-seems to be doing much of the work of critique that is usually first the task of agents and editors, and then that of booksellers and critics. But, when these particular readers do that work, they are derided as pitchfork-wielding hysterics. When it comes to Y.A., what, precisely, is the difference between the marketplace of ideas and a Twitter mob?

Part of the job of the editor-part of the process of vetting and critique, from the submission stage through publication-is to anticipate the many possible reactions to a project, such as a romance that trivializes the Kosovo War. A kerfuffle like the one over "Wolves" "is a good immediate trigger point for me to look at the titles on my list and the products I'm considering and to take that beat of introspection," an editor at a major publishing house, who works on Y.A. and children's books, told me. "Even if you disagree with the way a critique is delivered, or with the results of the critique, there's something there to be unpacked."

"Everything that bubbles up online is the tip of the iceberg in terms of all of the conversations had in-house," the editor continued. "I think every author should be allowed to make mistakes, and they should be given the opportunity to correct those mistakes before publication."

A major contributor to blowups like those around Zhao and Jackson, according to many observers I spoke with, is the homogeneity of the publishing world, which remains, on the editorial side, eighty-two per cent white and less than two per cent black, according to a 2015 survey by Lee & Low Books. People of color face economic and racial barriers to breaking into the industry: entry-level positions in editing or literary agenting, which are mostly situated in New York City, offer barely sustainable wages that favor those with existing support systems and family wealth. The result is that the people who are most qualified to weigh in on a text's treatment of marginalized identities are often the least likely to do so.

A digital-marketing manager at a major publisher, who used to work in kid lit, wrote to me in a Facebook message, "The majority of those who make the editorial and marketing decisions about Y.A. books are not within the typical Y.A. reading range, don't regularly consume the content beyond what their work would demand (this is in contrast to the people lower down who are genuine fans of the genre), and, most importantly, don't trust the people lower down when they give them advice about both problematic content and content that audiences are hungry for." This person says that she witnessed multiple instances of coördinators, managers, and assistants getting shot down after they'd approached their bosses with concerns about offensive material. When, several times, she e-mailed editors about what she saw as problematic passages in manuscripts she'd read, she did not receive a response. At a meeting about a story that portrayed "a marginalized perspective/religion," she recalled, "I asked if there were any readers of color on the project, meaning readers of that specific marginalization." The higher-ups "pointed to the one black woman in the room, an assistant, and said she read it." The book in question was not written by a black author, and the characters in question weren't black.

The marketing manager is concerned, she said, that a skittish industry will turn its back on literature by or about minorities, deeming such projects too dangerous to sign. "I could see a world where the people in power start to become afraid that acquiring diversely means they are more at risk," she wrote. The editor sounded a similar note. "I worry that my colleagues are just shying away completely from publishing anything that might attract controversy or negative attention," she said. "We don't want to censor authors, to only publish from a place of fear and reaction."

Arising from the dust cloud of these conflicts is the question of whether the readers scorching various Y.A. novels have legitimate reason to take offense, and, if so, what form the offense should take. After all, the vast majority of books that are published in any given year-in any genre, and of a vast range in quality-are effectively ignored by reviewers and the general public. Instead of airing their grievances, a title's detractors might wish to deny its author any free publicity, much less the opportunity to become a free-speech martyr. "If a book is offensive, it seems best to discuss it rationally, learn from the experience, and give attention to books they want young people to read," Karen Yingling, a middle-school librarian, said. She added that her students either don't know or don't care about "all the politics" of the Y.A. ecosystem: "They just want to read 'The Maze Runner.' "

This framing, however, may misread the intentions of the loudest kid-lit agitators, who view their critiques as constructive, not destructive. When Zhao apologized and withdrew her book, Y.A. stakeholders largely greeted her words with support and encouragement, seeing them as the result of being "called in"-reminded of one's values as a community member-rather than "called out." "This is a beautiful apology," the author Ellen Oh, who had used Twitter to challenge "Blood Heir" 's "colorblindedness" and "lack of awareness," tweeted. Oh and another author, L. L. McKinney, are often cited as the ringleaders of the online pushback against "Blood Heir," but, as the reviewer Gin Jenny pointed out, neither of them "were calling for the book to be pulled. . . . They both flagged problems; that's all they did." In a post, the blogger recapped the Zhao drama: "From my perspective, this was a successful interaction!" she wrote. "Some people identified problems in a book that had not yet been published. Not wanting to publish the book with those heretofore unnoticed problems, the author has opted to delay publication. But the coverage of the incident has been very 'gasp! Censorship!' " (After the controversy went viral, Oh, facing a flood of harassment, deleted her Twitter account-her perceived excesses, and those of McKinney, met a swift and brutal backlash, which itself reveals something about the underlying power dynamics of these tempests.)

Young-adult writers see themselves as educators, and they are hyperconscious that this generation of Y.A. readers is the most diverse ever. The author Heidi Heilig likens stereotyping in Y.A. books to outmoded technology: "It's a huge disservice to the kids to teach them wrong, to give them all this old crap that they don't want to use-why would you give your kid a shitty microwave, a crappy broken CD player?" she asked. Ellen Oh told me that Y.A. "is one of the few places that so many women of color and writers from marginalized communities have been able to be heard." Many of the people I talked to pointed out that this makes the subculture vulnerable to sexism and racism masquerading as concern for free speech. A combination of protectiveness and idealism has produced a slash-and-burn ethos that, in holding artists to high standards, may reflect a desire to do what has not been done in the past: take young-adult fiction seriously.

A serious consideration of "Blood Heir," for one, yields mixed results. The book lingers obsessively over skin color; in the first fifty or so pages, we are told of the main character Ana's "dust-gold skin," of her "fawn skin," of the "dusty olive of her skin," and that "she was a mix of the pale-skinned Northern Cyrilians and the tawny-skinned Southern Cyrilians who dwelled in the Dzyhvekha Mountains." The slave girl, with her "bronze" coloring and "startling aquamarine" eyes, at first seems an unlikely vehicle for anti-blackness (although in a since-deleted tweet, Zhao posted a mood board for "Blood Heir" where the slave girl appeared to be represented by the black actor Amandla Stenberg, in character as Rue from "The Hunger Games"). The slave girl is definitely coded as darker than Ana, and she exists only as a vehicle for the protagonist to suffer and rage and decide whether to unleash her devastating power. What prevents her from being more troubling is the fact that almost all of the characters in "Blood Heir" exist only so that the protagonist can suffer and rage and decide whether to unleash her devastating power. Another youth, with similar skin to Ana, is hardly developed at all before he bleeds out in her arms moments after we've met him.

On Twitter, critics cited a slave auction that plays a central role in the book's plot as evidence that "Blood Heir" borrows the tropes of chattel slavery without fully engaging with them. But the auction is a masked ball crossed with a gladiatorial show in a secret basement. Archers patrol the balconies. Nobles sip cocktails on the floor. In context, the scene does not feel evocative of United States history or suggest an analogy between the Affinites, with their dangerous powers, and black people. The book's allegories seem mythic, not historical. They are about discovering one's hidden potential, celebrating the liberation of the self. If anything, the damning readings of "Blood Heir" seem guilty of something that the Y.A. community mitigates against: the misapprehension of a cultural context unfamiliar to one's own.

Reports of the demise of "Blood Heir" may be greatly exaggerated. Its publisher, Delacorte, a division of Random House, told the Times in January that it still plans to publish the three novels it bought from Zhao, if and when she decides to move forward with the series. And many Y.A. titles that passed through the social-media wringer have fared perfectly fine. "The Black Witch" arrived, on schedule, to positive reviews and a No. 1 ranking in Amazon's department of "Teen & Young Adult Wizards & Witches Fantasy." Forest has since written a popular sequel, " The Iron Flower," and two prequels. "The Continent" came out in March, 2018, after Drake made revisions, and its sequel hits shelves in July. (Both Forest and Drake declined to comment for this article.)

But, with its gauzy romance unscrolling over a scrim of historical trauma, "A Place for Wolves" could prove too problematic to salvage. This possibility is causing some anguish in the Y.A. community, especially because, as a black and queer writer, Jackson is exactly the type of voice that many people want to lift up. Heilig, who offered "A Place For Wolves" a glowing early review-and then apologized for her praise on Twitter-told me that she agonized over her decision to withdraw support for the book. Jackson's identity puts him "on a very short list," she said. "I didn't want to make him a lightning rod."

At a recent PEN America panel on "callouts, correctness, and culture wars," the former New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma seemed to suggest that marginalized people's desire for authentic representation had a propagandistic edge. Sensitivity readers, he said, forced authors to create ennobled images-to describe an idealized world, not a real one. But the task of a sensitivity reader, properly understood, is to evaluate whether a given portrayal rings true or false, the Y.A. editor said. Depicting a character accurately and resonantly is literary work, a matter of craft. Too often, she continued, publishers insist on a false dichotomy between social justice and aesthetics, construing "sensitivity readers as troubleshooting, as something additional, rather than something that is intrinsic to characterization."

Criticism from outside of the Y.A. Twitterverse corroborates this more integrated vision. The Y.A. editor told me that "A Place for Wolves" was "a failure at the level of conception." Ostensibly writing in support of Jackson, Senior called his book "painfully clumsy and poorly placed." In this light, the outrage that advance readers of Jackson's book came to negative conclusions about it seems rooted in who gets to speak, and when, and how much power their words can wield-and, as it happens, these are all stated priorities of the Y.A. community.

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In Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?

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Arising from the dust cloud of recent conflicts is the question of whether the readers scorching various Y.A. novels have legitimate reason to take offense, and, if so, what form the offense should take.

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Tin Ma:
I chose this article because I think it is a controversial topic. Cancel culture has been effective in combating racism, sexism, or any other form of aggression or insult. However, Cancel culture will bring a feeling of disappointment and possibly grief to readers about the cancellation of their beloved author or book. I think the cancellation culture shouldn't be overused. I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn and correct the mistakes they have made. No one is perfect, if they dare to stand up to admit and correct their past mistakes then they should give them a chance.

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Melissa Iniguez:
I chose the article 'Is decision to discontinue some Dr. Seuss books latest example of cancel culture, or is it a sign we’re becoming ‘less racist' because out of all the articles I read this one does a good job breaking down and introducing me to cancel culture. This article allows us to see the different thoughts when it comes to cancel culture but most importantly carries a message. " 'Weaver suggests, bridges can be built between communities and more understanding can grow through people stepping out of their comfort zones to experience different people, spaces and cultures.' "(Weaver). This bridge shows how we should not just focus on getting a certain book or story canceled, but use the differences and knowledge to create change and help with racism and equality amongst one another. Making us see how we should work together as a community to not only learn about others but understand and be respectful towards our differences.

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So far, the Cat in the Hat and the Grinch and Sam-I-Am have avoided the fate of some of their counterparts in the Dr. Seuss universe, that charmed place where rainy days dissolve into housebound chaos, hearts suddenly grow three sizes and green eggs turn out to taste good after all.

In an age of growing sensitivity to racial portrayals in media, past and present, the move was hailed by some but excoriated by others who declared another instance of "cancel culture" claiming an innocent victim, in this case an author whose work by and large preaches tolerance and understanding.

But to say so raises a knotty question: What exactly is cancel culture? It seems to be invoked by everyone who sees a threat to a favored person or cultural artifact. Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, much in the news these days as he faces multiple sexual harassment allegations, declared himself a victim in rejecting calls to resign.

The phrase is new. The concept isn't. It used to be called political correctness, said Sigal Ben-Porath, professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, who described it as "a better branding of the same thing."

"Basically, there's the effort to clean the public sphere from views that some people find to be inappropriate, hateful, bigoted," she said.

The phrase "cancel culture" is typically used in a pejorative way to describe a variety of actions - forcing controversial speakers to cancel lectures, also called "deplatforming," removing statues and other memorials from public places, or ganging up on some person or cause on social media.

Because the term has been so widely used, it's been rendered almost meaningless, Ben-Porath said. But by any definition, the decision to discontinue the Dr. Seuss books doesn't really fit, she said.

"If you want to read 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street' to your children, are you still allowed to do it? Of course you are," she said. "They [the Seuss estate] own the rights, the manuscript. Dr. Seuss is not being canceled. Some of his works are not being promoted anymore. It's a very different thing."

Indeed, said Kirsten Hess, owner of Let's Play Books in Emmaus, Seuss remains a bestselling author, but for works that encapsulate his message without tapping into offensive racial tropes. She said putting aside a handful of books to address the hurt caused to some readers was appropriate.

"Canceling Seuss is not what happened at all," she said. "Months previously, [Seuss Enterprises] decided not to print those titles anymore because they listened to people - what an idea!"

In a sign of how poorly the move went over in some quarters, however, Hess received an avalanche of requests for the books when the news hit the media. Most appeared to be from people who weren't interested in the books themselves but were making a statement against the decision.

She explained that she didn't stock the books - which are already fetching exorbitant prices on eBay - and wouldn't fill orders for them.

"The people we spoke to on the phone were angry and thinking Seuss was going away permanently, that it was the beginning of the end," Hess said. "No one that ordered on the website or called had ever been a customer. I think that's telling."

Consider a few episodes that have attracted the cancel culture label:

Chris Harrison, longtime host of ABC's "The Bachelor," played down a contestant's past attendance at a party with an "antebellum" theme. After an uproar, he apologized and stepped away from his role. The risk of glorifying the Southern slave-holding era also prompted two bands to change their names, albeit on their own initiative rather than through pressure - The Dixie Chicks became The Chicks, while Lady Antebellum became Lady A.

Late-night host Jimmy Fallon faced calls for cancellation during the 2016 presidential campaign for playfully tousling Donald Trump's hair during an interview - a move that "normalized" the controversial Republican candidate, critics charged. Fallon's ratings suffered, but he survived the episode and remains on the air.

Maple syrup brand Aunt Jemima was rebranded because it evoked the stereotype of a subservient black woman.

The cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew was cut from the movie "Space Jam 2″ because his relentless pursuit of the opposite sex, with its unsolicited hugs and kisses, was seen as normalizing rape culture.

After years of pressure, the Washington NFL franchise, long known as the Redskins - a racially charged term for indigenous Americans - became "The Washington Football Team." The team is expected to select a new name this year.

A better example of cancelling is when some average Joe makes an inappropriate comment online and gets fired over it after public outcry. On Twitter, users often invoke the phrase "Twitter, do your thing" to unleash the mob on some insensitive poster. The effect is that the offender is ejected from the culture through a sort of cybershunning.

That's a harsh and often unfair experience. But there's value in examining changes to the way boundaries are drawn around what's socially acceptable, Ben-Porath said.

For example, the hype around Dr. Seuss "could be a sign that like our society is becoming less racist, that we're really zeroing in on how communities, especially communities of color, have been marginalized in popular media," she said.

This transformation has been happening for a long time. Some Bugs Bunny cartoons quietly disappeared from the airwaves because of racially charged depictions of people of color. Out of sensitivity to domestic violence victims, Jackie Gleason's classic sitcom "The Honeymooners" was edited to remove the "bang, zoom" scenes where he threatens to send his wife to the moon with a punch.

"I think that's the conversation we're having about who and what we value and who and what we honor, and which books we want to read our children," Ben-Porath said. "Having an open conversation about that and pushing back from one side to the other. I think it's just a good and lively and acceptable part of the democratic debate."

The best way to understand the movement is to talk to people who have felt the sting of the stereotype, the caricature, the insensitive comment.

Noreen Yamamoto Sherry, a Japanese-American resident of Lower Macungie Township, is keenly aware of the impact of Asian stereotypes. Sherry said she loves Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," but was appalled when she saw the film, in which Mickey Rooney's plays a myopic, bucktoothed caricature of a Japanese man for comic relief.

Not every depiction struck her the same way. When she read about offensive drawings of Asians in "And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" - the best-known of the Seuss books in question - she had to look them up.

"As a kid it didn't make a huge impression," she said. "But obviously it's dated and offensive."

Sherry has seen worse from the pen of Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. During World War II, he produced propaganda cartoons. One, intended to drum up support for the internment policy he fiercely supported, depicts a Japanese man in a booth labeled "Honorable 5th Column" handing out boxes of TNT to a long line of Japanese people from West Coast states. The caption reads "Waiting for the Signal from Home."

Geisel had a considerable change of heart after a 1953 visit to Hiroshima, where the terrible destruction of the 1945 atomic bombing was still starkly evident. The fruit of that visit was "Horton Hears a Who," in which an elephant discovers and protects the denizens of a microscopic world called Whoville. The book, with its famous line "A person's a person, no matter how small," was an allegory about mending relations with the Japanese and valuing them as equals.

In that story, Sherry finds hope that the noise surrounding cancel culture can give way to reasoned conversation.

"It's a real hot term right now," she said. "It makes people paranoid and feel like it's only a matter of time before they get in trouble for something I say. But I hope we can keep discussing this stuff and seeing things from the other side. We're a melting pot and that's what we have to do."

Cancel culture comes up during "cultural humility" training at the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, said Robyn Weaver, program manager for the Campaign for Racial & Ethnic Justice. It's regarded as an unhelpful term and concept.

"It's like good-bad binary," Weaver said. "So there's no room for any gray area. It's either you're good or you're bad. And that's the end of the conversation. It also serves as a method of deflecting from having that deeper dialogue."

The practice is also based on virtue-signaling, with people positioning themselves on a certain side of a debate, she explained. But that's also problem.

"This either/or thinking is actually an element of white supremacy culture, and it's meant to divide," Weaver said. "So, if we continue to perpetuate that through this cancel culture narrative, we're going to continue to stay divided."

And even though cancel culture was created and continues to proliferate through social media, the divisions it creates won't be mended there.

Instead, Weaver suggests, bridges can be built between communities and more understanding can grow through people stepping out of their comfort zones to experience different people, spaces and cultures.

But pivoting a catchy, alliterative hashtag like "cancel culture" from a two-sided issue to a more fluid discussion is a daunting task.

"Honestly, if I had a hashtag, it would be 'look up,'" Weaver said when asked how she would signal a pause for context in place of a call to cancel a person or piece of media. "Because, you know, there's obviously a narrative and agendas at play related to cancel culture, and that narrative and agenda aren't necessarily coming from the people near you, the people in your community, but from corporations, from politicians, from people in positions of power that are trying to further an agenda."

And as cancel culture is just the newest iteration of a practice that's been around for decades, it's important to stay aware, slowing knee-jerk, emotional reactions to explore the context.

"There's always going to be people trying to push a narrative, sell their products, oppress others, and the devices that are used to do those things that similar, but with different names and different methods," Weaver said. "So that's also just kind of an important thing to be aware of, which is why I'm saying look up, right? Because this is bigger than this moment and the two words cancel culture."

Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.

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Is decision to discontinue some Dr. Seuss books latest example of cancel culture, or is it a sign we're becoming 'less racist?'

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The withdrawal of several Dr. Seuss titles because of offensive imagery has sparked another battle in the culture wars. Putting aside a handful of his books to address the hurt caused to some readers was appropriate, though the cancel culture often does more harm than good, some Lehigh Valley observers say.

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I chose this article because it gave many good examples of authors that have been cancelled and the details behind them. Some of these authors are even in certain communities that "cancelled" them. I believe it is a very thin line when it comes to offending. I do not believe that all books should follow a specific "politically correct" narrative because it is still good to have other perspectives, even if they are wrong, so that readers can see all sides. I really liked a quote from the article where they are talking about a book that was cancelled before being published, "...(the book) should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance." Books should be judged on the plot and creativity by readers who want to read it, not Twitter critiques.

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Late last month, the author Kosoko Jackson withdrew the publication of his début young-adult novel, "A Place for Wolves," which had been slated for a March 26th release. The book, which follows two American boys as they fall in love against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, had garnered advance praise ("a tension-filled war setting, beautiful young love, family strength and all heart," one blurb enthused). It also had the imprimatur of the #ownvoices hashtag, in which the main characters of a book share a marginalized identity with the writer-Jackson is black and queer. But a disparaging Goodreads review, which took issue with Jackson's treatment of the war and his portrayal of Muslims, had a snowball effect, particularly on Twitter. Eventually, Jackson tweeted a letter of apology to "the Book Community," stating, "I failed to fully understand the people and the conflict that I set around my characters. I have done a disservice to the history and to the people who suffered."

The Jackson fracas came just weeks after another début Y.A. author, Amélie Wen Zhao, pulled her novel before it was published, also due to excoriating criticisms of it on Twitter and Goodreads. The book, a fantasy tale called "Blood Heir," depicts an empire that enslaves magical minorities, known as Affinites, and where "oppression is blind to skin color," as the promotional material phrased it. Critics felt that Zhao's slavery narrative had erased a specifically African-American experience, and they objected to a scene in which an apparently black slave girl dies in an apparently white character's arms, in an act of self-sacrifice. Zhao, who emigrated from China when she was eighteen, said that her book drew on "the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country."

Like Jackson, Zhao tweeted an apology to "the Book Community," writing, "It was never my intention to bring harm to any reader of this valued community, particularly those for whom I seek to write and empower. As such, I have decided to ask my publisher not to publish 'Blood Heir' at this time."

Jackson and Zhao are peers-both members of a Facebook group, the Novel Nineteens, for kid-lit and Y.A. creators publishing their débuts in 2019. Ironically, Jackson was one of the louder voices speaking out against Zhao; also ironically, he has worked as a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers, vetting manuscripts featuring characters from marginalized communities. "Now, Jackson has been demonized by the community he once helped police," the writer Ruth Graham noted in Slate.

Even casual observers of Y.A. controversies might have seen the Jackson and Zhao incidents, coming so close together, as an acceleration of an already established trend. In 2017, Keira Drake pushed back the release date of her début, " The Continent," when a groundswell of Twitter critics accused the book of racism. That same year, Laurie Forest's Y.A. fantasy début, " The Black Witch," likewise became the object of intense scrutiny, weeks ahead of its publication, after detractors slammed it as a white-savior tale. The writer Kat Rosenfield's New York magazine piece " The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter," which centered on the "Black Witch" outcry, revealed that many of Forest's fiercest critics had not read her novel, and others conflated the perspectives of racist characters with that of the author herself. (The review that set off the cancel campaign against "The Black Witch," by the blogger and bookseller Shauna Sinyard, "consisted largely of pull quotes featuring the book's racist characters saying or doing racist things," Rosenfield wrote.)

The Y.A. world is often credibly depicted as a censorious, woker-than-thou hothouse, and never more vividly than in Rosenfield's piece; the article has become a Rosetta stone for anyone seeking purchase on Y.A.'s callout-and-cancel culture. The community gadfly and bête noire Jesse Singal's recap of the Zhao controversy in Tablet carried the headline "How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author's Budding Career." "From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience," Graham wrote in Slate. The Times commissioned two first-person essays, one by Drake, on the "shameful stain" of these eruptions and the "tyrannical coddling of overly sensitive readers."

"What happened to Jackson is frightening," the author Jennifer Senior wrote, also in the Times. "Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power." "A Place for Wolves," Senior continued, "should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first."

Senior is right that the ongoing Y.A. wars are about power-about who has traditionally wielded power in publishing, and how that balance is shifting, for better or worse. A group of unpaid readers-one with an undeniable personal investment in the Y.A. community-seems to be doing much of the work of critique that is usually first the task of agents and editors, and then that of booksellers and critics. But, when these particular readers do that work, they are derided as pitchfork-wielding hysterics. When it comes to Y.A., what, precisely, is the difference between the marketplace of ideas and a Twitter mob?

Part of the job of the editor-part of the process of vetting and critique, from the submission stage through publication-is to anticipate the many possible reactions to a project, such as a romance that trivializes the Kosovo War. A kerfuffle like the one over "Wolves" "is a good immediate trigger point for me to look at the titles on my list and the products I'm considering and to take that beat of introspection," an editor at a major publishing house, who works on Y.A. and children's books, told me. "Even if you disagree with the way a critique is delivered, or with the results of the critique, there's something there to be unpacked."

"Everything that bubbles up online is the tip of the iceberg in terms of all of the conversations had in-house," the editor continued. "I think every author should be allowed to make mistakes, and they should be given the opportunity to correct those mistakes before publication."

A major contributor to blowups like those around Zhao and Jackson, according to many observers I spoke with, is the homogeneity of the publishing world, which remains, on the editorial side, eighty-two per cent white and less than two per cent black, according to a 2015 survey by Lee & Low Books. People of color face economic and racial barriers to breaking into the industry: entry-level positions in editing or literary agenting, which are mostly situated in New York City, offer barely sustainable wages that favor those with existing support systems and family wealth. The result is that the people who are most qualified to weigh in on a text's treatment of marginalized identities are often the least likely to do so.

A digital-marketing manager at a major publisher, who used to work in kid lit, wrote to me in a Facebook message, "The majority of those who make the editorial and marketing decisions about Y.A. books are not within the typical Y.A. reading range, don't regularly consume the content beyond what their work would demand (this is in contrast to the people lower down who are genuine fans of the genre), and, most importantly, don't trust the people lower down when they give them advice about both problematic content and content that audiences are hungry for." This person says that she witnessed multiple instances of coördinators, managers, and assistants getting shot down after they'd approached their bosses with concerns about offensive material. When, several times, she e-mailed editors about what she saw as problematic passages in manuscripts she'd read, she did not receive a response. At a meeting about a story that portrayed "a marginalized perspective/religion," she recalled, "I asked if there were any readers of color on the project, meaning readers of that specific marginalization." The higher-ups "pointed to the one black woman in the room, an assistant, and said she read it." The book in question was not written by a black author, and the characters in question weren't black.

The marketing manager is concerned, she said, that a skittish industry will turn its back on literature by or about minorities, deeming such projects too dangerous to sign. "I could see a world where the people in power start to become afraid that acquiring diversely means they are more at risk," she wrote. The editor sounded a similar note. "I worry that my colleagues are just shying away completely from publishing anything that might attract controversy or negative attention," she said. "We don't want to censor authors, to only publish from a place of fear and reaction."

Arising from the dust cloud of these conflicts is the question of whether the readers scorching various Y.A. novels have legitimate reason to take offense, and, if so, what form the offense should take. After all, the vast majority of books that are published in any given year-in any genre, and of a vast range in quality-are effectively ignored by reviewers and the general public. Instead of airing their grievances, a title's detractors might wish to deny its author any free publicity, much less the opportunity to become a free-speech martyr. "If a book is offensive, it seems best to discuss it rationally, learn from the experience, and give attention to books they want young people to read," Karen Yingling, a middle-school librarian, said. She added that her students either don't know or don't care about "all the politics" of the Y.A. ecosystem: "They just want to read 'The Maze Runner.' "

This framing, however, may misread the intentions of the loudest kid-lit agitators, who view their critiques as constructive, not destructive. When Zhao apologized and withdrew her book, Y.A. stakeholders largely greeted her words with support and encouragement, seeing them as the result of being "called in"-reminded of one's values as a community member-rather than "called out." "This is a beautiful apology," the author Ellen Oh, who had used Twitter to challenge "Blood Heir" 's "colorblindedness" and "lack of awareness," tweeted. Oh and another author, L. L. McKinney, are often cited as the ringleaders of the online pushback against "Blood Heir," but, as the reviewer Gin Jenny pointed out, neither of them "were calling for the book to be pulled. . . . They both flagged problems; that's all they did." In a post, the blogger recapped the Zhao drama: "From my perspective, this was a successful interaction!" she wrote. "Some people identified problems in a book that had not yet been published. Not wanting to publish the book with those heretofore unnoticed problems, the author has opted to delay publication. But the coverage of the incident has been very 'gasp! Censorship!' " (After the controversy went viral, Oh, facing a flood of harassment, deleted her Twitter account-her perceived excesses, and those of McKinney, met a swift and brutal backlash, which itself reveals something about the underlying power dynamics of these tempests.)

Young-adult writers see themselves as educators, and they are hyperconscious that this generation of Y.A. readers is the most diverse ever. The author Heidi Heilig likens stereotyping in Y.A. books to outmoded technology: "It's a huge disservice to the kids to teach them wrong, to give them all this old crap that they don't want to use-why would you give your kid a shitty microwave, a crappy broken CD player?" she asked. Ellen Oh told me that Y.A. "is one of the few places that so many women of color and writers from marginalized communities have been able to be heard." Many of the people I talked to pointed out that this makes the subculture vulnerable to sexism and racism masquerading as concern for free speech. A combination of protectiveness and idealism has produced a slash-and-burn ethos that, in holding artists to high standards, may reflect a desire to do what has not been done in the past: take young-adult fiction seriously.

A serious consideration of "Blood Heir," for one, yields mixed results. The book lingers obsessively over skin color; in the first fifty or so pages, we are told of the main character Ana's "dust-gold skin," of her "fawn skin," of the "dusty olive of her skin," and that "she was a mix of the pale-skinned Northern Cyrilians and the tawny-skinned Southern Cyrilians who dwelled in the Dzyhvekha Mountains." The slave girl, with her "bronze" coloring and "startling aquamarine" eyes, at first seems an unlikely vehicle for anti-blackness (although in a since-deleted tweet, Zhao posted a mood board for "Blood Heir" where the slave girl appeared to be represented by the black actor Amandla Stenberg, in character as Rue from "The Hunger Games"). The slave girl is definitely coded as darker than Ana, and she exists only as a vehicle for the protagonist to suffer and rage and decide whether to unleash her devastating power. What prevents her from being more troubling is the fact that almost all of the characters in "Blood Heir" exist only so that the protagonist can suffer and rage and decide whether to unleash her devastating power. Another youth, with similar skin to Ana, is hardly developed at all before he bleeds out in her arms moments after we've met him.

On Twitter, critics cited a slave auction that plays a central role in the book's plot as evidence that "Blood Heir" borrows the tropes of chattel slavery without fully engaging with them. But the auction is a masked ball crossed with a gladiatorial show in a secret basement. Archers patrol the balconies. Nobles sip cocktails on the floor. In context, the scene does not feel evocative of United States history or suggest an analogy between the Affinites, with their dangerous powers, and black people. The book's allegories seem mythic, not historical. They are about discovering one's hidden potential, celebrating the liberation of the self. If anything, the damning readings of "Blood Heir" seem guilty of something that the Y.A. community mitigates against: the misapprehension of a cultural context unfamiliar to one's own.

Reports of the demise of "Blood Heir" may be greatly exaggerated. Its publisher, Delacorte, a division of Random House, told the Times in January that it still plans to publish the three novels it bought from Zhao, if and when she decides to move forward with the series. And many Y.A. titles that passed through the social-media wringer have fared perfectly fine. "The Black Witch" arrived, on schedule, to positive reviews and a No. 1 ranking in Amazon's department of "Teen & Young Adult Wizards & Witches Fantasy." Forest has since written a popular sequel, " The Iron Flower," and two prequels. "The Continent" came out in March, 2018, after Drake made revisions, and its sequel hits shelves in July. (Both Forest and Drake declined to comment for this article.)

But, with its gauzy romance unscrolling over a scrim of historical trauma, "A Place for Wolves" could prove too problematic to salvage. This possibility is causing some anguish in the Y.A. community, especially because, as a black and queer writer, Jackson is exactly the type of voice that many people want to lift up. Heilig, who offered "A Place For Wolves" a glowing early review-and then apologized for her praise on Twitter-told me that she agonized over her decision to withdraw support for the book. Jackson's identity puts him "on a very short list," she said. "I didn't want to make him a lightning rod."

At a recent PEN America panel on "callouts, correctness, and culture wars," the former New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma seemed to suggest that marginalized people's desire for authentic representation had a propagandistic edge. Sensitivity readers, he said, forced authors to create ennobled images-to describe an idealized world, not a real one. But the task of a sensitivity reader, properly understood, is to evaluate whether a given portrayal rings true or false, the Y.A. editor said. Depicting a character accurately and resonantly is literary work, a matter of craft. Too often, she continued, publishers insist on a false dichotomy between social justice and aesthetics, construing "sensitivity readers as troubleshooting, as something additional, rather than something that is intrinsic to characterization."

Criticism from outside of the Y.A. Twitterverse corroborates this more integrated vision. The Y.A. editor told me that "A Place for Wolves" was "a failure at the level of conception." Ostensibly writing in support of Jackson, Senior called his book "painfully clumsy and poorly placed." In this light, the outrage that advance readers of Jackson's book came to negative conclusions about it seems rooted in who gets to speak, and when, and how much power their words can wield-and, as it happens, these are all stated priorities of the Y.A. community.

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In Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?

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Arising from the dust cloud of recent conflicts is the question of whether the readers scorching various Y.A. novels have legitimate reason to take offense, and, if so, what form the offense should take.

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Jada Paez Suares: When choosing an article this one in particular caught my attention. I think that as more people use social media this idea of cancel culture is becoming a huge thing in where we revisit the past and get to call out what flew over some people's heads. Things have changed and what was "tolerable" back then also has. Many get their information from online resources so it is so important to make sure everything is up to date and correct or it could influence people very negatively. I think cancel culture could be used greatly if used appropriately. It could be hard to learn that your favorite artist could have a racist past, but they should get exposed. You should know who you are giving your money towards. This can be the case with children's book authors. Although they have influenced a whole generation, their ways should still be spoken against if needed. There are many non-problematic authors that should share their voice with the future.

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

Nel, who is a professor of English at Kansas State University and director of the children's literature program there, spoke with me about the book a few years ago. I republished the conversation here earlier this year when it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.

No, a Virginia school district didn't ban Dr. Seuss books. Here's what really happened.

Nel is back with this post, in which he discusses racism in children's books and the way the issue has become politicized. At the heart of his piece is this:

"Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), 'You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.' "

For those who want some resources on this issue, you can check out a webpage that Nel created titled: " Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-Racist Children's Literature."

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the "cancel culture" that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it's hard to cancel a dominant culture. "Cancel culture" is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children's books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump's "big lie."

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly - on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) on March 10 slammed Republicans for talking about Dr. Seuss instead of "working with us on behalf of American workers." (The Washington Post)

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children's culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.

It's easy to inspire a reactionary response. When you point out racism in a beloved artifact of childhood, people can feel personally attacked. Children's books are signposts not just to our childhoods but to the formation of our selves. Examining them critically can feel akin to a violation, because they reside deep at the core of the "me" in each of us.

Those who work themselves into hysterics over Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head nurture this feeling of being personally attacked. They amplify nostalgia for an allegedly "innocent" childhood, when Dr. Seuss was not political, life was simpler and America was "great." This is what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia - a longing for a unified, uncomplicated past, an "enchanted world with clear borders and values." However, as Boym warns, "Only false memories can be totally recalled."

We instead need what Boym calls reflective nostalgia, which dwells in memory's imperfections, exploring the ambivalence, the complexity, the pain that restorative nostalgia strives to erase. We must show people that deeply felt memories do not authorize indifference toward others and do not remove the need for reflection. We must ask, "What if something we loved as children might cause harm today?" Indeed, "What if it caused harm then?" What would it mean to acknowledge pain?

As James Baldwin wisely observed, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." Pain offers one path toward reflection. The hate mail I get is full of pain expressed as aggression. The force with which these writers blame me, or liberals, or academics, or women, or Black and Brown people is a way of locating responsibility for their own pain in others and avoiding looking inward.

To steer people toward reflective nostalgia, we need to break the addiction to cancel culture conspiracy theories. These are addictive because conspiratorial thinking feels like critical thinking, but better: The conspiracist can put the puzzle pieces together, see the patterns clearly because he's smarter than you, better informed than you, and thus justified in his anger. Or so goes the illogical logic of the conspiracy theorist.

To break the addiction, we might begin by exposing the toxicity of the ingredients. Restorative nostalgia is the emotional fuel and thickening agent for cancel culture. But it does not act alone. It blends five cultural myths into a "rational" alibi for an irrational, fact-free fantasy of grievance and rage. To cultivate a healthier, reflective nostalgia, let's dismantle these myths.

First, we must reject the notion that children's culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and "innocence." It's better to develop more complicated relationships with what we loved as children. Embrace Dr. Seuss's poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism. When you embrace all of it, you poison yourself and others.

Second, unlearn popular myths about history and social progress - myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a "man of his time" or that say, "That's how they thought back then." Who is this they? All people everywhere? All White people? At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?

The "they thought that way then" claim presents past racism as inevitable. But racism is not inevitable. As Robin Bernstein notes, "In the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present." The proportion of people who think particular thoughts has changed, but the "array of thinkable thoughts" has not. In the past and the present, both ordinary and extraordinary people have opposed white supremacy; both remarkable and unremarkable people have supported it.

In the same period that these withdrawn Dr. Seuss books were published, quite different portraits of people of African descent appear in the children's books of Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and of White writers such as Hildegarde Hoyt Swift and Lynd Ward.

Third, we must unlearn the "either/or" idea of racism. Dr. Seuss does both racist and anti-racist work, often at the same period in his career. The 1940s cartoons are both racist against the Japanese and support civil rights for African Americans; the 1950s children's books include the racist caricature of "If I Ran the Zoo," but also the anti-discrimination messages of "Horton Hears a Who!" and the first version of "The Sneetches." Dr. Seuss is recycling racist caricature at the same time he's striving to oppose racist ways of thinking.

This fact confuses people who think you're either on Team Racism or you're on Team Anti-Racism. However, racism is not an either/or. It's a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.

My awareness is only partial, too. When preparing to teach the book in a graduate class on 20th-century picture books, I read Helen Bannerman's "Little Black Sambo" for the first time. And I realized that I already knew this story. Had I read her version? Or an edition with more grotesque racist caricature? What other half-remembered stories lurk in my subconscious?

Fourth, another ingredient of cancel culture that we need to unlearn is the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn't intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. I agree: I don't think he saw these images as harmful or intended harm. But racism doesn't depend upon perception or intent. It's very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.

Fifth, because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don't see. On the morning of March 2, I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," "If I Ran the Zoo," and "Scrambled Eggs Super!" will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.

But what were the other three? I saw "McElligot's Pool" and "The Cat's Quizzer" on the list, and thought:Well, Dr. Seuss often uses exoticism and foreignness as a punchline. Were there examples in these books? Yes, there were. But "On Beyond Zebra!"? That's a personal favorite, one of Dr. Seuss's most avant-garde books. It invents an entirely new alphabet, reminding young readers that this language they're learning to read is arbitrary and slightly ridiculous. What could possibly be objectionable?

In rereading, I realized the book's caricature of a Middle Eastern man was ... a caricature of a Middle Eastern man. I had not seen the illustration as a caricature until Dr. Seuss Enterprises pointed it out.

I've written a lot about Dr. Seuss, and about racism in his work. I've written about blackface minstrelsy's influence on "The Cat in the Hat." My book "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" began the conversation that led to Dr. Seuss Enterprises' decision. You'd think I would have noticed. I hadn't. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't see what I didn't see.

When you grow up in a racist culture, you won't see all the racism - it's just part of the world in which you live. If you have only ever seen a polluted ocean, then that's what an ocean looks like. Only when someone points out the pollution in the ocean or the racism in the culture, do you notice. And begin to ask questions.

But cancel culture nostalgists never ask or answer the questions. What in the culture are they defending? And why not instead celebrate books that, instead of perpetuating harm, represent people of any heritage with respect?

Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little.

But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."

That "breaking" is what reflective nostalgia allows. It allows you to reassess what you once loved. It allows you to meet new favorite books celebrating the diversity of human experience.

That's not cancellation. That's cultivation. That's healing. That's love.

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Perspective | Breaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic books

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Philip Nel is the author of " Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature and the Need for Diverse Books," a 2017 book that helped launch a conversation about racism in children's books that led to a recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six of the prolific author's books.

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Jhennifer Lemus: This article, "The war on words: how cancel culture is taking over the world of books", covers over the basic meaning of what is cancel culture and the relationship it has with social media. The audience opinion is what determines the #canceling of and author or anyone who is an artist, most of the times these artist are canceled in social media, if anything that they post becomes offensive and controversial. I read this article because. I recognized some of the controversies that they talked about, one recent and most famous one would be J.K Rowling and her transphobic comments. The article went even further in to talking how her controversy even affected the people she was working with and the fans who were enjoying it.

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ho would have thought that in 2021, as cancel culture becomes the new norm, the effect on authors has been to plunge the literary world into a freedom of speech crisis? Author Lionel Shriver calls it "a quasi-Soviet phenomenon".

A writer says or writes something controversial on social media, in print or on TV. The news breaks, the crowd bays for blood, the tide turns and the writer is "cancelled", shunned or left with a badly-damaged reputation.

In the past year, high-profile authors targeted include JK Rowling, Jordan Peterson, Jeanine Cummins, and Julie Burchill, and there are plenty more, many of whom we have never heard of. Some are deemed to have committed worse crimes than others, resulting in anything from mild censorship to accusations of insensitivity, cultural appropriation, misogyny, racism or transphobia, while others have had their book contracts revoked - and writers must learn to navigate this moralistic new world.

"Publishers are not working in a vacuum, they're part of a larger social tide," says Shriver. "They read the same newspapers we do, and they're frightened like everyone else, because it's a merciless movement, with people piling onto the side of righteousness for self-protection." But as righteous as publishers may be, they are also in the business of making money.

Take JK Rowling, who was labelled a toxic transphobe after she posted a tweet mocking the word "people" who menstruate instead of "women". First it was trans activists, then leading Harry Potter actors Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Eddie Redmayne came out against her. Now, former Potter fans are expressing doubts about whether it is still "acceptable" to enjoy the books.

Staff working on Rowling's latest children's book, The Ickabog, at Hachette were so "upset" they threatened to down tools. The management pushed back. "We will never make our employees work on a book whose content they find upsetting for personal reasons, but we draw a distinction between that and refusing to work on a book because they disagree with an author's views outside their writing, which runs contrary to our belief in free speech," was the official statement.

A former employee puts it differently. "The employees were encouraged to follow diversity and pro-trans initiatives. There was only one way we were supposed to think about these issues, but then JK Rowling, their most successful author, said what she said, so the management had to take a stand in favour of free speech and face down the younger staff. That's when they realised these initiatives had gone too far in the first place, which a lot of employees felt, but no one was prepared to come out and say it."

Shriver, who admits that her anti-woke opinions make her publishers "anxious", thinks the staff at Hachette should have been allowed to walk out. "I feel that strongly. Let the minions who rise up leave, they're replaceable. The more you play to this idea of power, the more power you give them. This is a story of institutional cowardice, with people in positions of authority frightened of exercising that authority."

Similarly, the news that Penguin Random House Canada would be publishing outspoken Canadian psychologist and life coach Jordan Peterson's sequel to his 12 Rules for Life apparently reduced many of its employees "to tears".

The publishing company's diversity and inclusion committee received at least 70 anonymous messages from staff with only a couple in favour of publishing it. The book went ahead anyway and comes out in March. Like Rowling, Peterson is lucrative. 12 Rules sold over five million copies, but as Shriver points out, few other authors have that degree of "fame and fortune" protection.

For Julie Burchill, whose book, Welcome to the Woke Trials became a casualty of the very issue it was describing, after her comments on Twitter to Muslim "libertarian communist" journalist Ash Sarkar.

Constable swiftly cancelled Burchill's contract. "While there is no legal definition of hate speech in the UK, we believe that Julie's comments on Islam are not defensible from a moral or intellectual standpoint," it said. Burchill retorted she would look for another publisher. "They said I'd crossed the line and would probably do so again. They're not wrong. But they knew what I was like." She says she has three publishers "brave and small as opposed to big and cowardly" interested in her book.

Cancel culture feeds on the public's perception of reputation. Who do you know, what is your identity? Combined with the growth of corporate culture - and some of these publishers are now vast behemoths - reputation and brand values are everything. "Cancelling an author's contract if they bring your organisation into disrepute is entirely justified. In the US, a lot of contracts now include clauses to this effect, " according to another publisher.

Writers must also beware of other potential booby traps. After her novel American Dirt, about an illegal Mexican migrant, was published in 2019, Jeanine Cummins was accused of cultural appropriation because she is not Mexican, and of filling the novel with stereotypes. Violent threats caused her publishers to cancel a book tour, but Cummins now says her biggest regret was writing the "clumsy" author's note justifying her reasons for writing it. "But that just served to open the door for people to make their criticisms extremely personal instead of about the book," she says.

Cancel culture's biggest ally is social media. Lauren Taylor Shute, who runs an editorial coaching consultancy in New York, tells aspiring authors: "You're entering into a dialogue and everything you put out there opens a door to discussion, so be sure that it's a room you want to enter first, because you will have an audience and they will talk back." They sure will.

This raises a question. Would any UK firm publish Donald Trump's memoirs? A fortnight ago Republican senator Josh Hawley's book about the tyranny of big tech was scrapped by Simon & Schuster, after he was photographed raising his fist in salute to pro-Trump protesters on his way to the US Capitol. The general consensus seems to be not. "Who wants to be associated with Trump? You've got to think of your company brand."

Almost everyone I spoke to for this article was nervous about expressing their views openly, while publishers were not prepared to talk on the record. What does that tell us?

An exception was Mark Richards, who set up indie publishing imprint Swift last year. "The role of publishers is to help society talk about the most difficult issues. But, with a few exceptions, they have become far too one-sided on far too many topics, arbiters not facilitators of debate. And that's not good for publishing or society."

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The war on words: how cancel culture is taking over the world of books

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ho would have thought that in 2021, as cancel culture becomes the new norm, the effect on authors has been to plunge the literary world into a freedom of speech crisis? Author Lionel Shriver calls it "a quasi-Soviet phenomenon". A writer says or writes something controversial on social media, in print or on TV.

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I used this link because I reminded me of how many of these books I own/owned growing up. They were books everyone had and loved. I still have many in my own children's libraries in their rooms. For example, I remember even having a green eggs and ham day at school where parents came in and cooked us all green eggs and ham and we read Dr. Seuss books. This short article talks about one person's point of view on cancel culture. I can understand some works needed to be retired, but cancelled? Is it possible to separate or "cancel" an author and keep their previous works alive?

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The one day of the year where elementary school kids could defy the norm and eat green eggs and ham at school, Dr. Seuss day. Out of all my most memorable memories from elementary school, Dr. Seuss day brought me the most joy. I vividly remember the hallway overflowing with paper-cut-out Truffula Trees. Students belly laughing as their teachers read Wacky Wednesday followed by inspiration from Oh The Places You'll Go. Even some of my favorite childhood movies were based on Dr. Seuss' work: Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat. Dr. Seuss brought so much color to my childhood.

Recently, Dr. Seuss novels have become cancel culture's next victim. Six of Seuss's works of art were pulled from Amazon because of "racial implications." One of these being an Asian man illustrated with "slanted eyes" and a "pointed hat" in Seuss' "And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street."

Although I agree that this representation of a Chinaman can be considered racist, it should not be the reason we cancel an entire publication. Dr. Seuss wrote his books with intention of assisting children that have difficulty reading. The simplicity of the vocabulary in his books allowed children to stay engaged all while having fun images to look at such as Ethel the Elephant or Mertle the Turtle. His intention was never to degrade a race or offend anyone in that matter. This can be seen in his popular quote "A person's a person, no matter how sma ll." Clearly, Seuss stood for equality for all. This is a broad quote that covers gender, age, height, and yes- race. However, that would totally contradict the media's narrative of Dr. Seuss. To them, Seuss is a horrible man that should be canceled because he drew a man from China with traditional Chinese attire. I do not agree. I will say, the slanted eyes were probably too far and could offend someone of like-race, but Dr. Seuss did not have bad intentions with his characters. He's a children's book author for crying out loud.

We should be less worried about canceling children's books and far more worried about the explicit music played on the radio. No one feels like canceling rappers that say the "n-word," yet, society is so quick to cancel a harmless children's book series. There is no consistency in cancel culture and it is ruining the lives of innocent people and even ruining the legend of people who have passed. If we are worried about corrupting the minds of kids, we need to cancel the racism problem as a whole. Yes, cancel your precious Cardi B. Just like the popular Dr. Seuss quote used in numerous Black Lives Matter campaigns says, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

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The one day of the year where elementary school kids could defy the norm and eat green eggs and ham at school, Dr. Seuss day. Out of all my most memorable memories from elementary school, Dr. Seuss day brought me the most joy. I vividly remember the hallway overflowing with paper-cut-out Truffula Trees.

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Mae Horner:

I chose this article because it named 5 Banned Books from American literature. The author of this article was stating the positive and negative affects of cancel culture. On one hand, canceling a specific list of books can lessen the racism, sexism, and disrespectful or hurtful language to some readers. But on the other hand, canceling books can also negatively affect others. Authors see their books being taken away, all of the hard work and time that they put into writing a book, and it is being canceled right in front of them. The article states, "banning books has often been used as a means to silence and 'cancel out' the voices and opinions of authors". So, I can see how banning books is a way to protect other's from offensive comments and disrespectful slurs. But, authors are kicked to the curb and have no choice but to have their projects stripped from them. Which means no one is able to read the books that they put their hard work into.

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Cancel culture is a term that's being thrown around a lot these days. Writers like J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, and Salman Rushdie signed an open letter earlier this week denouncing the shaming and ostracism many public figures face online. Arguably, cancel culture goes much further back to before the time of Twitter mobs and Instagram activists. In some ways, banning books has often been used as a means to silence and 'cancel out' the voices and opinions of authors. But art persists and survives in surprising ways, and these 5 banned books are proof of that!

It probably doesn't come as a surprise to you that Orwell's famous dystopian novella, Animal Farm, was banned in the USSR until the 1980s due to its scathing criticism of communism. But did you know it's currently banned in the UAE because talking pigs are deemed as offensive to Islamic values?

When you look at our dreamy Alice in Wonderland poster and read the text, it's hard to imagine that this whimsical tale could be offensive enough to ban. But at one point it was banned in China due to the belief that animals should not use human language, nor be placed on the same level as people!

The irony of banning a book about burning books was clearly lost on certain American school districts when they scratched it from reading lists due to questionable language and themes of censorship, religion, and oppression.

The Catcher in the Rye has earned a bit of a reputation over the years. Some of this is due to its bizarre connection to the murder of John Lennon, but it's also been banned for vulgar scenes and foul language.

Atwood is one of the 150 individuals to sign the open letter against cancel culture, and perhaps a contemporary author who is very familiar with the concept of censorship. Despite the huge international popularity of The Handmaid's Tale (it was even made into a hit Hulu series, now heading into a 4th season), it has been banned for its sexual themes, portrayal of violence against women, and criticism of Christian-centric religions.

Do you have any favorite books that have been banned at some point?

Our literary posters are made from the text of famous books-yes, even the banned ones-and are a creative gift for any book lover. Check out our poster selection, or put in a you'd like to see hanging on your wall!

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Cancel culture is a term that's being thrown around a lot these days. Writers like J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, and Salman Rushdie signed an open letter earlier this week denouncing the shaming and ostracism many public figures face online. Arguably, cancel culture goes much further back to before the time of Twitter mobs and Instagram activists.