Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American writer who wrote many books that have been part of our childhood. His rhymes and fun illustrations have been part of generations and generations of kids who have enjoyed reading famous titles such as "The Cat in the Hat" or "Green Eggs and Ham." Dr. Seuss was a man that wanted kids to learn and have fun with his books and just wanted to make people happy.
On March 2, the day where his birthday is celebrated, the Dr. Seuss Company announced that they would ban 6 Dr. Seuss titles from the market, for containing racist and offensive stereotypes. Some of these banned texts included "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."
In my opinion, Dr. Seuss was not racist, he just wanted to make other people laugh, and learn from these books. In most of his books, you don't see any actual skin color. His characters are just innocent strangely colored skin characters with white, yellow, blue, red skin... The ones who have been banned showed an African character barefoot and with a skirt made of leaves and an Asian character with chopsticks and a pointy hat. We do have to see the book in context and understand that it was written long ago, where portraying these stereotypes far from being offensive, was funny for kids.
I think nowadays people just complain or find mistakes on things that do not make sense at all. My memories of these books that I read it and I didn’t see or understand if he was being racist or that was rude to any culture.
In conclusion, I feel is not fair to damage his image and hard work. I believe that those books should not be banned because they can actually be used by teachers to help kids to learn about racism and everything that happened in the past. The publishers could also adapt the content so is not offensive to any culture, instead of just erasing them and pretend they never existed, and take off the value of Dr. Seuss's creativity and dedication, which helped kids love and appreciate reading.
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