Done with Seuss

So Dr. Seuss' birthday is coming up and I am frequently asked to read at schools for this occasion. I have very conflicted feelings about Dr. Seuss. On the one hand, his books were among the first I remember reading, in particular A to Z and Hop on Pop. On the other, his books often contain racist characterizations, the "Chinaman" in And to Think that I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, and his art from the WW2 period was extremely racist as well. Seuss himself said that his story Horton Hears a Who was dedicated to a Japanese man, Mitsugi Nakamura, as a way of atoning for his past misdeeds and racism, but I'm not sure that allegorical storytelling is sufficient to make up for the real harm inflicted upon Japanese Americans because of his racist art.  On top of this is the issue of Cat in the Hat and how he, as well as other classic cartoon characters of the period, exhibit all the tropes of minstrelsy. More information on this can be found here.  For this reason I have not decorated my library for Dr. Seuss' birthday or otherwise celebrated it the past two years.

A lot of people push back against this notion of not reading Dr. Seuss or not watching some old movies because they believe that the racism in them was typical of the time and thus should be excused away. There is this notion that things in the past, things one has grown with as a child are somehow sacred and should always be the canon, should always be taught to the next generation. "Oh its just X what's the big deal?" they say with a shrug. Why? Why do people feel the need to defend things that don't need defending? I love sharing Star Wars and Princess Bride with my daughter, but I don't feel the need to read her Little House on the Prairie because how incredibly racist it is to Native and Black people. I don't know if you are aware of this, but more books have been written since you were in school. I hate to break it to you, but your childhood favorites aren't inherently better because they were loved by you when you were children. Why must we prop up Dr. Seuss over any other author, over authors of color, over women, over people whose characters have not be blasted all over lunchboxes for the past 50 years?

When I was asked by a school to read today, I did so but with a caveat: I asked if I could read another book from the library. Instead of reading a Dr. Seuss book, I read Wild About Books by Judy Sierra and Marc Brown about a librarian who opens a library in a zoo. It is a fun rhyming story in the style of Dr. Seuss and even mentions Dr. Seuss among the books the animals at the zoo read. I read to three classes today: 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade. All of them are older than the typical audience for Dr. Seuss anyway which makes me wonder why this holiday is being celebrated in their classes in the first place. With the younger two classes I simply said "I don't have a Dr. Seuss book today, but this is another fun story that has a lot of great rhyming words." Then I came to the 5th grade class. These are 10 and 11 year old kids. A sea of brown faces: the school is about 90% Latinx. I said, "Hey, so I don't have a Dr. Seuss book today. A lot of older Dr. Seuss works are, frankly, kinda racist. I kind of have mixed feelings about Dr. Seuss because I grew up with him but I thought I would share this other fun book instead. If you like silly rhymes I encourage all of you to write! One thing Dr. Seuss was great at was making up a lot of crazy words. Maybe you can try it." It was the first time I think I was that blunt with a group of kids. I wondered why that was.

If we are going to create a new generation of kids who embrace diversity, who understands the role that race plays in our daily lives, who deconstructs old notions of gender, then we have to do some real work. Some of that work requires us to let go of the things we used to love and accept that, yeah, maybe that mammy in those Bugs Bunny cartoons was pretty gross, and maybe the crows in Dumbo were pretty gross, and maybe all those books we read as a kid with monkeys as main characters looked like blackface caricatures. For many white people, it is hard to acknowledge one's own racial biases, especially when you perceive yourself as an otherwise liberal person. So you voted for Obama and you hate Trump and you are against the wall. Great! So why when people of color or Native people are telling you that the old books or movies you like are hurtful to them do you push back? Is it simply that you are willing to be a "good" person when it is easy and not when it requires you to make any kind of substantive changes to your thinking? I am trying to do better. It is hard. It takes work. But if my fellow white educators, parents, and librarians put in the same amount of work what a wonderful world we could live in. A world where an author of color rolls off the tongue as quickly to every school child as Dr. Seuss' does.