English-speaking children around the world seem to enjoy the books of Dr. Seuss. The whimsical rhymes and enrapturing rhythm are fun to hear when read out loud. But not of his books are fun for kids of color.
“The mainstreaming of racism and prejudice is deeply embedded in our culture. It is high time that Dr. Seuss’ work is examined,” said Ann Burroughs, President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. “The klieg light of history could not have provided more compelling evidence.”
Despite the popularity of the Seuss books, some of them are harmful to kids of color and perpetuates racist stereotypes. That's why the family-run Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing some of the author's offensive books for its portrayals of POC, including Asians.
The family released the following statement on March 2, the birthday of the late author, who was born Theodor Seuss Geisel:
Today, on Dr. Seuss’s Birthday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises celebrates reading and also our mission of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.
We are committed to action. To that end, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following 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." These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
Beloved classics like "The Cat in the Hat," "Green Eggs and Ham" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," among others are unaffected by the estate's decision.
Conservative politicians tried to blame the Democrats and "cancel culture" for this the estate's decision, as stated by Minority Leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, on the floor of the House of Representatives. To be clear, the action to pull the six books does not affect the dozens of books by Dr. Seuss and the decision was made by the author's estate, which oversees the author's legacy, not by any political body.
Although one of the most popular children's authors in the world with hundreds of millions of his books sold, his racist tendencies appeared throughout his work, according to a study, “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” written by Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens and published in the journal "Research on Diversity in Youth Literature"
That study, published in 2019, examined 50 books by Dr. Seuss and found 43 out of the 45 characters of color have "characteristics aligning with the definition of Orientalism," or the stereotypical, offensive portrayal of Asia. The two "African" characters, the study says, both have anti-Black characteristics.The decision by the estate of Dr. Seuss’ books to end publication of six of the author’s children’s titles that depict harmful caricatures of people of color was welcomed by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM).
In a press release, the JANM pointed out one example of the stereotypical image in “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” of an Asian man with slanted lines as eyes, wearing a conical hat, and carrying a bowl with chopsticks.
JANM notes that there is a darker historical context to Theodor Seuss Geisel’s work. Well-documented studies of his career as an editorial cartoonist reveal racist cartoons that depict Black people as crude, barefooted and wearing grass skirts, and Asians as a dangerous race not to be trusted.
One of Dr. Seuss' most inflammatory cartoons is “The Honorable Fifth Column.” (See below)
It features Japanese American men lined up along the West Coast of the U.S. being handed boxes of TNT, presumably for treasonous violence. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the drawing reinforced the dangerous war hysteria and racial prejudice of the era that led to the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans.
In the 1950s, Seuss wrote “If I Ran the Zoo,” which includes drawings of nose-ring-wearing Africans and a verse that talks about Asian workers “who all wear their eyes at a slant.” He wrote “Scrambled Eggs Super,” which has Arab stereotypes. He wrote “The Cat in the Hat,” with a main character whose looks (white gloves, jaunty hat, floppy tie) and actions (outsider, con man, ignorant bumbler) can be traced to blackface minstrelsy.
But in that same decade, Seuss also created “Yertle the Turtle,” an anti-fascist send-up of Hitler, and “Horton Hears a Who!” which was dedicated to a Japanese friend and can be seen as an apology of sorts for his racist wartime cartoons. He wrote an essay critical of racist humor, and he published a magazine story that would later become the anti-discrimination book “The Sneetches.”
In a statement in 2017, in an interview for the San DIego Union, the family estate said the Seuss' own story is “one of growth with some early works containing hurtful stereotypes to later works like ‘The Sneetches’ and ‘Horton Hears a Who!,’ which contain lessons of tolerance and inclusion.’ The statement concludes with a quote from Seuss: “It’s not how you start that counts. It’s what you are at the finish.”
In the 2019 study by Ishizuka and Stephens, they wrote: “Minimizing, erasing or not acknowledging Seuss’ racial transgressions across his entire publishing career deny the very real historical impact they had on people of color and the way that they continue to influence culture, education, and children’s views of people of color.”
Dr. Seuss
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