(MENAFN- Gulf Times) The racism row comes amid a longstanding effort to correct a lack of
diversity in children's literature, which is itself part of the ongoing and
often explosive debate about race in America
He was a doctor who made house calls, millions and millions of them, and his unique and wildly popular prescriptions influenced the way generations of children see and understand the world.
Now Dr Seuss is undergoing his own posthumous examination.
Twenty-six years after the La Jolla, California, children's book author died, some of his most beloved creations, including The Cat in the Hat, are being re-evaluated because of imagery that some consider racist.
The controversy comes amid a longstanding effort to correct a lack of diversity in children's literature, which is itself part of the ongoing and often explosive debate about race in America.
On Thursday, Dr Seuss Enterprises, the San Diego-based company that oversees the author's estate, decided to remove a mural from the recently opened 'Amazing World of Dr Seuss museum in Springfield, Massachusetts, the writer's hometown. Taken from the pages of a 1937 Seuss book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, the mural depicts a slant-eyed, chopsticks-carrying Chinese man in a way that critics called 'deeply hurtful.
'While this image may have been considered amusing to some when it was published 80 years ago, it is obviously offensive in 2017, said writers Mo Willems, Lisa Yee and Mike Curato in a letter explaining why they had decided to bow out of a literary festival, since cancelled, that had been planned at the museum for next Saturday.
In a statement, Seuss Enterprises said the mural would be replaced with images from later works like The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who! that contain lessons about tolerance and inclusion. 'This is what Dr Seuss would have wanted us to do, the company said.
The mural controversy came two weeks after an elementary school librarian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, turned down a donation of 10 Seuss books from First Lady Melania Trump.
'Many people are unaware, librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro wrote, 'that Dr Seuss' illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and racial stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example) and you'll see the racist mockery in the art.
Her comments drew the attention of media around the world and sparked an uproar in all the usual places where America's cultural and political disputes get aired.
While supporters praised Soeiro for raising the issue — You rock, read one posting, My hero, read another — critics accused her of being rude and ungrateful, of 'political correctness. They called her a hypocrite after a photo surfaced of her at a school event wearing a Cat in the Hat stovepipe and clutching a Cat in the Hat doll.
Her school released a statement saying she had been out of line.
The furore quickly overran the underlying question, one that could alter the legacy of a writer whose four-dozen books collectively have sold more than 650 million copies worldwide, whose earnings last year were calculated by Forbes magazine at $20 million (placing him seventh on its list of Top Earning Dead Celebrities), whose books are still often the very first given to newborns.
Was Theodor Seuss Geisel racist?
IT'S ‘COMPLICATED'
Philip Nel, a professor at Kansas State University, is one of the nation's leading Seuss scholars. He's written three books featuring the children's author, including Was the Cat in the Hat Black? Published in August, it explores the impact of blackface caricature and other racial stereotypes on the 1957 story that made Seuss famous.
Nel, who is white, calls Seuss 'racially complicated, and he said to understand why you have to go back to the author's childhood in the early 1900s, and to The Hole Book, which includes a black mammy talking in dialect about a watermelon. It was one of Seuss' favourites; he remembered it so well that, into his 60s, he could still quote its opening verse by heart, Nel writes.
In high school, Seuss acted in blackface in one production, and at Dartmouth, he drew a cartoon in which two thick-lipped black boxers fight. In the magazine Judge, in the late 1920s, he drew cartoons of blacks that used the N-word.
While readers of Seuss' children's books today may be appalled by those images, Nel writes, they were considered acceptable and were 'all too common from cartoonists of that era. The result, according to Nel: 'The popular culture of the early 20th Century embedded racist caricature in Geisel's unconscious, as an ordinary part of his visual imagination.
In 1937, when Seuss published his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, it included the image of the Chinese man that triggered the mural controversy at the Seuss museum in Springfield. It has a line about a 'Chinaman who eats with sticks. Years later, recognising how some readers might be offended by the wording, he changed 'Chinaman to 'Chinese man.
As World War II dawned, Seuss started working for a New York newspaper called PM. From 1941 to 1943, he drew more than 400 editorial cartoons. 'He did great anti-racist work there, and he did work that was racist, Nel said. 'It was the same person, the same body of work, done at the same time.
On one hand were cartoons like 'Waiting for the signal from home, published on February 13, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, when fears of another Japanese military attack were high, especially on the West Coast. It shows Japanese people, caricatured with slanted eyes and buck teeth, standing in a line that stretches from California to Washington. They are picking up packages labelled TNT.
On the other hand were cartoons like the one titled What This Country Needs Is a Good Mental Insecticide. Published on June 11, 1942, it shows another line of people, this time white. They are waiting to be sprayed by an Uncle Sam figure. The man at the front of the line has just been doused, and emerging from one ear is a flying insect labelled 'racial prejudice bug. The man says, 'Gracious! Was that in my head?
To Nel, the 'Mental Insecticide cartoon is an important clue to the racially insensitive imagery that wound up in some of the children's books.
'You appreciate the impulse there, but he conceived of racism as a bug, and that's not how it works, Nel said. 'It's not aberrant, it's ordinary. It's not strange, it's everyday. That's what he doesn't understand. Most people who aren't targeted by racism don't think about it. He was not unusual in that respect.
MAKING AMENDS
Michelle Martin grew up in South Carolina, attended all black schools, and the first story she remembers reading as a child that featured someone who looked like her was The Snowy Day. Published in 1962, it's widely credited with breaking the colour barrier in children's literature, showing a non-caricatured African-American boy named Peter enjoying the season's first snowfall.
Martin said it wasn't until middle school that she learned that the author of Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats, was white. She had assumed he was black. That experience, and others, got Martin wondering about what else she didn't know about children's literature, in particular African-American children's literature. She grew up to be an expert in the subject and is now a professor at the University of Washington.
'Seuss, like any other author, was a product of his time, Martin said. 'Fortunately, some authors grow and figure out that maybe some of the things they wrote early on were harmful and they try to make amends. Seuss did that.
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. — The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS
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