Tuesday, October 10, 2017

More on this …

… Dr. Seuss in the Crosshairs | Frontpage Mag. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To be sure, after the Phipp Soeiro story went public, the embarrassments began to mount: a photo surfaced of Phipp Soeiro herself at some school event, dressed up as the Cat in the Hat and clinging to a copy of the Dr. Seuss book and a Cat in the Hat puppet; a whole bunch of photos surfaced showing Mrs. Trump's infallible predecessor, Michelle Obama, reading aloud to kids from one of Dr. Seuss's “racist” books; news stories surfaced in which our revered former President Barack Obama himself was quoted as telling a group of children that one of his “favorite stories” was by Dr. Seuss; the Cambridge school district distanced itself from Phipp Soeiro's action, announcing that it had “counseled” her on “donations policies and the policy against public resources being used for political purposes”; and the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, hometown of Dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Geisel), called Phipp Soeiro's comments about the local hero “ridiculous” and exemplary of “'political correctness' at its worst.” 



4 comments:

  1. Soeiro's sources for addressing the racism issue in Dr. Seuss books, what's in her good open letter, is from this year. One from Spring, and the most recent from September, if I recall correctly. One of the 2 sources apparently being used by the Cambridge public school system as they address this issue, is on the same blog as her open letter.

    Going into the past, or saying that the article was somehow anything but a librarian getting the message out, is jumping at hypercriticism, making false assumptions along the way, and not addressing what Soeiro is communicating. In other words, it's not about her. She's the messenger. It's about whether there is racism in Dr. Seuss books. That's what she was writing about.

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  2. No false assumption about her dressing up as and reading The Cat in the Hat. The new posture looks like grandstanding to me.

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  3. It looks like she dressed up like The Cat in the Hat just like everyone else used to. Many, such as she, won;t be doing that any longer. The timing of her sources is ever important, this very year, as is the fact that her job would require her to be current on such matters. She did not make up the stance, she passed the word on, in a very well done open letter. What is gained by killing the good messenger?

    The grandstanding is more what others like the upset librarian or whatever, is doing, attacking another librarian for doing her job, instead of looking into what seems to be a very important issue. Address the actual issue. Soiero is not an issue.

    Soeiro is simply being a librarian in an award winning school system. That's how Cambridge got there, with workers like her. Why keep silent on such an important issue as racism?

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  4. Ms Phipp Soeiro might have read Mr Nel's take on The Cat in the Hat as early as 2014 because an article by him on this, which no doubt became the first chapter in his book, was published in the Children's Literature annual:  Project MUSE - Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss’s Racial Imagination.

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