On March 2, The decision was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprise to no longer publish six Dr. Seuss books.

The pulled books were titled And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot’s Pool, If I Ran The Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, On Beyond Zebra! and The Cat’s Quizzer. The decision was made due to the books containing racist and antisemetic stereotypes. Although new copies of the books will no longer be printed, they will still be available at libraries to be read.

In If I Ran The Zoo, three Asian characters are depicted as carrying a white male on their heads while the white male is holding a gun. The book also shows two barefoot African men who are wearing grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.

 In The Cat’s Quizzer, a Japanese man is portrayed as having a bright yellow face and squinted eyes. 

“I think it’s a very wise decision [to stop publishing the books]. These books that might be entertaining to white people can be incredibly harmful to young and impressionable POC [people of color]. I’m glad the publishing company has figured out the right thing to do, and discontinued the books,” Corinne Adams, ‘24 said. 

Adams believes that “allowing blatant racist and anti-semetic tropes and stereotypes to run rampant in the media, especially media majorly consumed by very young audiences, is unacceptable.”

However, some disagree with the decision to pull the books. 

“I feel that it is unnecessary and that these books weren’t made to be racist. The images of the [Iniut people] and the Chinese people are just how they were depicted in the era those books were written. I feel as though we are losing a part of our childhood when we take these books off our shelves,” Rachel Mcgovern, ‘24, said.

Many people enjoy the books and do not think that they were meant to be racist. Although that may be true, others believe that even though it wasn’t meant to be racist, they should still be pulled because of anti-semetism and bigotry.