We're having difficulties getting consensus around the idea that past racism reflected in some cultural artifacts (same as they reflect countless other things of the times) means they should be thrown out.
Else, few, and only fringe usually crazy people would not agree that e.g. slavery, seggregation, jim crow, redlining, etc, were and are bad.
But a certain modern "anti-racism" is not used against the establishment or the white privileged class, and is not even driven by blacks themselves demanding justice.
It's driven by upper middle class whites and their wanabees in-preparation (e.g. higher end college students), against lower class whites.
And as such, it's not just classist, but also blind to the injustices working class whites and "white trash", blacks, latinos, etc, face because of poverty and inequality - it serves as a class signal to perpetuate 'woke white supremacy' (and as a career to some).
Then again, what I know? I'm not American, and we have been actual slaves ourselves in my country...
The issue specifically with casually reinforcing negative stereotypes, especially in childrens books, is that it seems at least plausible that will influence readers' perceptions later on. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument with respect to these specific books so long as they're only a small part of a child's reading experience, but the argument is at least reasonable, right?
This is kind of like: should you be advertising cigarettes to minors? (Should you be advertising those at all?)
I do think it's quite painful to be cutting out culturally important artifacts like this, but I also understand the argument to do so, and it has pretty much nothing to do with upper-class vs. lower-class.
Most of the issues with these books seems fairly minor; it sounds like it should be feasible to release a new edition avoiding the negative stereotypes while retaining pretty much all of the cultural value. Not sure why the publisher didn't try to do that... or maybe they are, and this is just the way they're doing that so as to also hype up the new edition for sales. Who knows. (Yes, I realize eBay's decision is technically distinct from the publishers, but clearly they're trying to avoid negative PR here, i.e. being risk-averse by just following somebody else's lead - I doubt any of these dominos would have fallen without the publishers choices).
It’s their store. They can decide what they want to sell in their store. I bet there is a marketplace for people who like boring uninteresting and outdated children’s books. Maybe try a used book store.
A thousand times this. Neoliberal capitalism has hollowed out the middle class over the past 30+ years. The working class knows that the ruling class doesn’t address their interests. They have been voting for the change candidate since 2008. The election of Trump, despite all of his flaws, was a rejection of the ruling class. This ’woke’ movement is a reaction by the upper/ruling class to reassert their authority. As Dr. King said, the rich white plantation owner used slavery to keep the poor white man down.
edit:
I wonder if the post-WW2 expansion of the middle class was an anomaly, and that we are now just reverting to the mean.
Changing the definition of a word without consensus will have the effect of the consensus around the underlying concepts changing. This appears obvious to me, and intentional.
