A few of these books are only incidentally racist so I hope Dr. Seuss Enterprises sees fit to tweak and re-release them similarly to the Richard Scarry classics[1] others have mentioned.
Cultures have been bowlderizing kids books for as long as there have been kids books. Early versions of classic fairy tales had characters meet gristly ends -- skinned alive, forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, decapitated, eyes plucked out, etc. You can still find the original versions (including on eBay) but the kids section of the library generally carries the revised versions and no one was shocked that Disney decided not to animate the part of the story where the little mermaid had to choose between murdering the prince in his sleep and bathing her feet in his blood or committing suicide in the ocean.
Though when kids are old enough to think critically about this sort of thing I generally agree with Philip Nel [2] that reading books and talking about them is a much better approach to problematic books, so I also hope they ultimately decide to release annotated versions as well. I just wouldn't stock those in the kids section of the library.
Cultures have been bowlderizing kids books for as long as there have been kids books. Early versions of classic fairy tales had characters meet gristly ends -- skinned alive, forced to wear red-hot iron shoes, decapitated, eyes plucked out, etc. You can still find the original versions (including on eBay) but the kids section of the library generally carries the revised versions and no one was shocked that Disney decided not to animate the part of the story where the little mermaid had to choose between murdering the prince in his sleep and bathing her feet in his blood or committing suicide in the ocean.
Though when kids are old enough to think critically about this sort of thing I generally agree with Philip Nel [2] that reading books and talking about them is a much better approach to problematic books, so I also hope they ultimately decide to release annotated versions as well. I just wouldn't stock those in the kids section of the library.
[1] https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...
[2] https://philnel.com/2010/09/19/censoring-ideology/ is