You must not read them here or there. You must not read them anywhere.

September 26 to October 2 is this year's "Banned Books Week," a yearly event sponsored by the American Library Association and other like-minded organizations. Banned Books Week celebrates "the freedom to read," an appropriate, liberal anti-censorship sentiment. This year's slogan, similarly, is "Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us."

But what happens when the nice liberals who support Banned Books Week are the ones giving in to the current Zeitgeist and doing the censorship themselves? Consider the following.

This past March, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that controls the legacy of famed children's author Theodore Seuss Geisel (aka "Dr. Seuss"), announced that it would cease publication of six of Seuss's titles:

• And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street
• McElligot's Pool
• If I Ran the Zoo
• Scrambled Eggs Super!
• On Beyond Zebra!
• The Cat's Quizzer

In a March 2 statement, Dr. Seuss Enterprises said, "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

For example, And to Think that I saw It on Mulberry Street has an illustration of a turbaned Indian rajah riding an elephant. On another page, there's a yellow-skinned, slant-eyed, "Chinaman who eats with sticks," sporting a queue, wearing a coolie hat and clogs, and eating out of a rice bowl with chopsticks. In Scrambled Eggs Super!, in which the protagonist goes to heroic lengths to gather the ingredients for the perfect scrambled eggs, he calls up a man named Ali to procure a particularly rare egg. Ali is illustrated in stereotypical Arabic garb: a turban and pointed shoes.

Are these caricatures stereotypical and insensitive? Certainly, a style of art that would have raised no eyebrows in the 1930s, when And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street was published, offends the sensibilities of a reader in 2021. Seuss was a man of his time, and when sensibilities changed, he occasionally made appropriate amendments to his books. But are the caricatures racist? I don't think so. Racism implies malice, and there's no maliciousness in the story. The rajah and Chinaman on Mulberry Street are simply a fact, and Ali is implied to be a friend of the narrator of Scrambled Eggs Super!

A private company like Dr. Seuss Enterprises can do what it wants with its intellectual property, including taking it off the market. I have no beef with that, even if I find the reasoning misguided. But it didn't stop there.

A few days later, online auction site eBay announced that it would be stopping the resale of the discontinued Seuss volumes. Now, eBay is not Dr. Seuss Enterprises. They're a third party that enables private sales. However, citing their "offensive material policy," they delisted hundreds of listings for the Seuss books, which presumably weren't "offensive materials" in February.

But it got even worse. The Chicago Public Library, too, got on the bandwagon, pulling all six books from the stacks once all the holds placed on them were honoured. "Materials that become dated or that foster inaccurate, culturally harmful stereotypes are removed to make space for more current, comprehensive materials," they said in a statement. (If you want to read undated, accurate, culturally harmless materials, five copies of Mein Kampf, which contains no offensive stereotypes of conical-hat-wearing Chinamen, are still available for your reading pleasure.)

I don't live in Chicago, but I don't doubt that somewhere near the entrance to the public library, there's a glass display case with books like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped in it—three challenged books that are being highlighted in this year's Banned Books Week. I'll bet there aren't any Dr. Seuss books on display. Book censorship is just fine when you're the one doing the censoring.

Think it'll stop with these three books? Two years earlier, an organization called Learning for Justice posted an article titled "It's Time to Talk About Dr. Seuss," in which they argued (with a straight face, presumably) that his anti-racist book The Sneetches "is actually not as 'anti-racist' as we once thought"—because although the eponymous Sneetches learn to accept one another regardless of whether or not their bellies are emblazoned with a star, "this message of 'acceptance' does not acknowledge structural power imbalances." In The Sneetches, Dr. Seuss teaches his young readers that prejudice based on superficial physical appearances is stupid and absurd. He is, of course, correct. But because he did not do so via today's fashionable, critical theory-inspired, ideology of "anti-racism," Seuss's opposition to racism doesn't go far enough. Last year's progressives are this year's racists.