Thread by @richterscale

I was born in the 70s and was a voracious reader as a kid, meaning that I internalized a huge amount of implicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, and colonialist ideas even while being exposed to all the feel-good united-colors-of-benetton celebrations of diversity.

In the 80s, kids were still consuming tons of media that was decades old, which very often contained outdated ideas of what constituted full humanity. And a lot of 80s pop culture was really pretty awful on that front.

This media instilled implicit biases in my developing mind.

The dominant media environment that I grew up in was overwhelmingly *supportive* of someone like me--a straight white middle-class boy in America, so even though I knew, for example, that racism was *bad*, the books I read normalized a racist world.

That's tough to re-learn.

So when Seuss Enterprises decides to cease publication of books that present--in cute, fun format for kids!--some frankly awful racial stereotyping, they're making a decision to stop telling children pernicious lies about people different from them.

That's good!

It's also kind of sad, of course, that a book that you grew up loving turns out to have problems. We reflexively buck at the idea that something we love isn't pure and good all the way through.

But that's not a good reason to perpetuate its ugly message.

Dr. Seuss has plenty of other fantastic books out there, and his problematic works will always be available and *should* be read as part of a critical look at an influential figure--including his development of thought on issues of inclusion and diversity.

Coda:

This isn't about conforming to a standard of "correctness."

It's about a commitment to recognizing others' humanity and accepting that we've internalized ideas that get in the way of that recognition, but that we can do better.