Oh, the extreme places they’ll go. Last week, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would no longer publish six Seuss books said to contain racially offensive imagery, foes of cancel culture (this author among them) cried foul. Many others shrugged, noting correctly that this isn’t an issue of censorship: A book publisher is free to decide it wants to cease publishing a very old book.
But now those books are being pulled from the shelves of some public libraries as well. “We are part of the broader community who have identified these books as being harmful,” Manny Figueiredo, director of education for a school board in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. “The delivery of education must ensure that no child experiences harm from the resources that are shared.”
A journalist for the Toronto Star issued an impassioned plea for more libraries to take action—and for Dr. Seuss Enterprises to make amends for its historical failures.
It’s not just Canada: The Chicago Public Library system agreed to remove the six books in question—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer—pending an investigation.
Disappearing books from library shelves gets us closer to the classic example of censorship, though of course a physical library possesses a finite amount of space and thus has to consider certain priorities. What’s happening to Dr. Seuss is the result of a very specific kind of prioritization, however: One decided upon not by readers or the public at large, but by activist educators peddling a false narrative about the beloved child author’s books and characters.