The Reckoning with Dr. Seuss Has Been Overdue
When six Dr. Seuss books were “canceled” earlier this year, many critics cried foul.
By JONATHAN ALVAREZ
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“Look at me, Look at me, Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” Do you remember reading this during your childhood? It’s from The Cat in the Hat, the famous Dr. Seuss book most of us laughed at as kids. It’s hard to believe that the same person who wrote those words also once drew offensive depictions of foreigners.
Theodore Seuss Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, the well-known children’s book author and political cartoonist, had six of his books “cancelled” by his estate earlier this year. The titles And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer are now no longer available in stores. Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that the six canceled books “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
They made the right decision. It was a correct move to cancel these books because they contained illustrations of racist stereotypes that are disturbing to the eyes of many readers.
In If I Ran the Zoo, there is a shocking image of African tribesmen in the jungle with the text, “I’ll go to the African island of Yerka and bring back a tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka.”
In And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Seuss depicts a caricature of “a Chinese boy who eats with sticks” wearing traditional clothing that will be very off-putting for some readers. These images promote misinformation and stereotypes about the people of the world.
Seuss “often sees national or ethic or racial difference as exotic and as fun, or as funny,” said Philip Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University and the author of Dr Seuss: American Icon.
After the Japanese army attacked America at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Seuss drew cartoons depicting Japanese with large front teeth and Japanese-Americans as disloyal citizens stockpiling explosives and “waiting for the signal from home.”
Still, most Dr. Seuss characters are white. In 2019, a study by researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens examined 50 Seuss books and found that “of the 2,240 (identified) human characters, there are forty-five of color, representing 2% of the total number of human characters.” And those 2% are often drawn in stereotypical depictions that offend many modern readers.
According to the National Post, in 2017, when then-First Lady Melania Trump gave a whole collection of Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts school, the books were returned with a note that the literature was “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
On the other hand, many of Seuss’s later books, such as The Sneetches and The Lorax, teach good messages. Yertle the Turtle teaches kids that everyone deserves equal rights, with lines such as “I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights.”
“The books we share with our children matter,” said Rebekah Fitzsimmons, an assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Books shape their worldview and tell them how to relate to the people, places, and ideas around them. As grown-ups, we have to examine the worldview we are creating for our children, including carefully re-examining our favorites.”
Critics have said that the cancelation of these six Seuss books is a case of censorship going way too far. The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) said, “We must draw a line between criticizing texts and purging them. If we remove every book that is offensive to someone, there will be very little left on the shelf.”
But censorship rules should vary between children's minds and adult minds. The eyes of children see everything as true, but in the eyes of adults, it varies. Adults can see what is right and what is wrong, but children can see things in books and interpret that as real life.
Editors, assistants, marketing teams, and publicity teams need to work together to pinpoint racist imagery in older children’s books. Kids' minds are like sponges; they soak up everything. They could interpret these cartoons as representative of actual people.
Parents also need to be more cautious in what their children are reading because that can influence the person they become in the future. Librarians need to inspect the books that are being put on the shelves.
Dr. Seuss is adored by millions around the world for the positive values he teaches in many of his books, so is it necessary to cancel older works that present stereotypical depictions of Asians, Blacks, and Arabs? Of course it is. These books, and others, that present wrongful depictions of foreigners should be banned.