Pete Trumbore ✒ A public reckoning with the racist imagery in much of Dr. Seuss’ work has actually been a long time coming. I’ll forgive you if you didn’t read my 2015 post on the topic.
In that piece I focused on the World War II propaganda cartoons he drew in support of the US war effort, and the dehumanized imagery he produced to depict our Japanese foes compared to his much more sympathetic portrayal of, namely, Adolf Hitler.
One of the racist images in Dr. Seuss’ If I Ran the Zoo. |
Those images were completely in line with the race thinking that serves as a foundational element of American foreign policy ideology, how we understood the world and our place and role in it. Anglo-Saxonism is its core, placing America and Britain as a single people standing atop a racial hierarchy in which Germany was a racial close cousin, separated from us only because it had “lost its love of liberty.” Asians fell far down the ladder at whose absolute bottom stood Blacks. As I wrote six years ago:
The point I was making then, and which I want to reiterate now, is that Dr. Seuss was no outlier in the way that he thought about race compared to other Americans. The racism visible in his work was part and parcel with the systemic racism of his times which we still struggle to acknowledge and overcome.
What has changed is our willingness to continue to overlook it.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the foundation that oversees the artist’s legacy and publishes his works, announced yesterday that it will no longer publish six of his books, most notably And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, and If I Ran the Zoo, from which the image at the top of this post is taken. Mulberry Street holds a special place in my heart. It was the first Seuss book I remember reading (or more likely remember being read to me). And I’ll acknowledge not being aware that, in the words of the announcement, “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
But I can’t say that I’m surprised, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. While conservative culture warriors may race to the airwaves and Twitter to decry the decision as cancel culture run amok, reality isn’t so simple. Nor is Seuss’ legacy.
Because Seuss was on the right side of history on many of the issues of his day. He drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws and defending Black rights to equal employment. He drew cartoons lambasting Nazi policies and attacking the isolationism and anti-Semitism of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Movement.
And he drew a lot of things that were and are shockingly racist. We should be mature enough to acknowledge that even as we embrace the lessons of environmentalism in The Lorax and tolerance and acceptance in Horton Hears a Who!
Seuss’ liberalism, and his racism, are his legacy. And they’re our legacy too.
The wartime cartoons of Dr. Seuss put these [issues] on vivid display. In the images reproduced here, Hitler is portrayed as essentially an aristocrat, his head held high in a posture of contempt of others, almost attractive and noble for all his arrogance. Not so the Japanese, shown here leering with a slant-eyed squint through thick glasses, with buck-toothed grins. Or as inhuman monsters and insects with caricatures for faces.
The point I was making then, and which I want to reiterate now, is that Dr. Seuss was no outlier in the way that he thought about race compared to other Americans. The racism visible in his work was part and parcel with the systemic racism of his times which we still struggle to acknowledge and overcome.
What has changed is our willingness to continue to overlook it.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the foundation that oversees the artist’s legacy and publishes his works, announced yesterday that it will no longer publish six of his books, most notably And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, and If I Ran the Zoo, from which the image at the top of this post is taken. Mulberry Street holds a special place in my heart. It was the first Seuss book I remember reading (or more likely remember being read to me). And I’ll acknowledge not being aware that, in the words of the announcement, “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
But I can’t say that I’m surprised, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. While conservative culture warriors may race to the airwaves and Twitter to decry the decision as cancel culture run amok, reality isn’t so simple. Nor is Seuss’ legacy.
Because Seuss was on the right side of history on many of the issues of his day. He drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws and defending Black rights to equal employment. He drew cartoons lambasting Nazi policies and attacking the isolationism and anti-Semitism of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Movement.
And he drew a lot of things that were and are shockingly racist. We should be mature enough to acknowledge that even as we embrace the lessons of environmentalism in The Lorax and tolerance and acceptance in Horton Hears a Who!
Seuss’ liberalism, and his racism, are his legacy. And they’re our legacy too.
The good Professor might need a safe space to think things over in, and can I suggest he read's Orwell's 1984 and pay particular attention to the constant erasing and rewriting of history in that world and what the outcome was. The problem with today's society isn't "woke" or "conservative" people, it's raising a bunch of delicate petals who must be shielded at all costs from bad hurty words.
ReplyDeleteFuck your censorship hidden in political correctness.
I think Pete is hitting the grey area between the black and white that makes for lazy characterisation. Black and white might make the world easy to read but it hardly helps us to live in it.
DeleteThis piece highlights the nuance and contradictory strain in people and invites reflection on the one size fits all method of addressing them.
I think what may have once been popular will not as our tastes, standards or knowledge develope. Steve is right about censorship under the cloak of woke/pc. Take the once popular sitcom The Cosby Show which I once enjoyed... it just does not have the same appeal that it once had now that we know Cosby was a sexual predator. Likewise with Dr Seuss... the author of the article discloses that he once enjoyed Seuss' work, but now he doesn't.
ReplyDeletewhich is a choice we should all be free to make. I wonder more about the obliteration of past truths in a bid to appease modern sentiment. For example the calls to ban Agatha Christie's book, Ten Little Niggers. It was of its time. Banning it today is a meaningless gesture. Same as insisting on banning the N word when it is used in the context of referring to that particular book title. None of it changes the past. It does not even change how we think about the past but merely prompts us to reflect on how we sanitise the past from the perspective of the present.
DeleteDescribe the past in all its dimensions without conceding anything to its wrongs in terms of legitimacy.
Brilliant book, have they not changed the name to Ten Little Indians? It was a take on counting just like the eanie, meanie,minie, moe selection rhyme we used when playing street games -it is now, catch an elephant by the toe. Our views, morals and standards change or become more refined -like a dummy tit (teat) is now a soother -as you say, none of it changes the past but it can in some ways plot the path of our enlightenment, or lack off it if the objective is to erase the past rather than deal with it. Should we erase unpleasant or unflattering history or learn from all its dimensions as you suggest?
DeleteStevie,
ReplyDeleteThe problem with today's society isn't "woke" or "conservative" people, it's raising a bunch of delicate petals who must be shielded at all costs from bad hurty words.
Tell that to your loyalist friends and come back and tell the Quill what they think. Northern Ireland committee head apologises for ‘offence’ after bonfire tweet (Irish Times)
"Senior Conservative MP Simon Hoare has since deleted the post on Twitter that said: “Who knew William of Orange arrived in Ireland with hundreds of wooden pallets hence the traditional pallet burning fiesta began.”
The tweet was criticised by members of the loyalist community and was deleted soon afterwards, before Mr Hoare issued an apology."
Everyone is on board with freedom of expression until they get offended by someone else's. Personally if anyone is offended by what I say, it is their problem not mine....
Steve is absolutely right about the petals and snowflakes. I am sure he is just as capable of seeing it in the loyalist community as elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteFrankie/AM,
Delete100 % though I must admit I found the humour in it!
Let me say that I do in fact still enjoy much of the Dr. Seuss canon. I don't think that's a contradiction with acknowledging that some of his work, including many of his WWII-era propaganda cartoons, are, by today's standards, pretty clearly racist. Even is those depictions were perfectly acceptable when he drew them.
ReplyDeleteI'll also point out that these two books, both of which we had in our collection of children's books when I was a kid, were removed from the market by the publishers themselves, and not in response to some "woke cancel culture" outcry. This, of course, proved to be a stroke of marketing genius, as right-wing media figures here in the US screamed bloody murder and their followers bought Seuss books in droves.
I'll repeat one other point that I made in this, and the earlier, post that I wrote on Seuss' racism. It was the norm for its times. His attitudes were not out of step with polite society in the US in the 1930s and 1940s (nor are they that far out of the mainstream today). Seuss was, in this regard, typically American.
Peter - I think we often tend to ignore just how social attitudes can be. We who have been socialised into seeing things very differently from Dr Seuss would be prudent not to think we arrived at that position as a result of our individual selves. The socialised vantage point we view him from was never something he had the benefit of.
DeleteI may have been too harsh in my opine. My apologies.
DeleteCompletely fair, Anthony. It’s always prudent to acknowledge the times, and those who inhabited them, for what they were. It is in many ways unfair, and frankly arrogant, to impose our modern values on figures of the past who were the products of very different socialization. That said, when it comes to issues of race in America, this case is a nice illustration of the extent to which racism is systemically embedded in society, then and now.
ReplyDelete