Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Arctic Aboriginals…
Exactly. Like how I used to love Miss Mary Jane on Romper Room when I was four, and my parents didn’t tell me about her past as a fan dancer until I was thirty.
Okay none of that happened. But if she had been a fan dancer, waiting until I was an adult to let me find out would have been the right move.
The vast majority of racism that pervades our society and harms people isn’t specifically intended. Requiring a finding of intent is such a big loophole that it basically sanctions racism.
Have you seen the grotesque caricatures of Chinese and African people in those Seuss books? Those aren’t negative?
There are. In fact, his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was originally supposed to be a bunch of text descriptions to go along with an artist’s series of "“cockney sporting plates.”
(Which in no way invalidates your main point.)
Everything in Dr. Seuss is grotesque. Take, for example, this Russian. The caricatures of Asian people are exaggerated but I don’t think they are intended to demean, but rather identify where they are from. (I’ll grant that the ones of Africans are a bit much.)
Even that isn’t too different from his usual style. This is Seuss racist.
Yes, that one’s the worst I’ve seen.
Seuss had a long history of racist cartoons. During WWII , he drew nasty cartoons about Japanese Americans. As white boomers’ stranglehold on our culture finally starts to loosen, a lot of things that they never thought to question are now being challenged. This is a good thing. Hearing from more voices means hearing some unpleasant truths.
Well, yeah. That’s how it works.
Like they said:
Exactly. Under the law the titleholding estate has the same prerogatives as the author for these purposes.
I know, I know, some people do disagree with the concept of the creator being able to choose to restrict if, when and how their creation is published/performed after having released it, up to and including to withdraw it from print. But right now the law is on the side of the titleholder to the rights, until the defined time period runs out.
The NY Times wrote that he said he was indeed embarrassed by the cartoons he drew for newspapers in the early 1940’s.
It also said that in the early’ 70’s, editions of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street were published with “a Chinaman” changed to “a Chinese man”.
Well, they disagree if it’s being done for the wrong reasons. Anti-racism and such.
The actual Romper Room controversy with Miss Sherri was also probably something best left for adulthood. Or at least, teenhood.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your tits
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Inuits.
There - now no one can object to that…
Interesting note: Seuss himself made this cartoon on the topic.
At face value, it appears to be something of a course correction, or an apology, or something like that.
But the creation date for the cartoon is 1942, when Seuss was also busily engaged in creating propagandistic material in support of the war effort against Japan, which included seriously grotesque racist caricatures.
And when you really think about the message of the cartoon, it suggests that the man being treated is essentially innocent, that he was unaware of his bigotry until it was removed and presented to him. Rather than Seuss accepting responsibility that what he believed and did was wrong, it seems defensive, like he’s trying to let himself off the hook. Rather than apology, it comes off as apologia.
The ways people wrestle with their learned and innate biases are complicated and nuanced and very, very gray. There’s no simple answer.
This topic seems to have really hit a nerve.
My thoughts:
1.) Times have definitely changed. One of the books being withdrawn is from 1937, and at that point “a Chinaman who eats with sticks” was seen as simply an interesting addition to the parade. At least they got the costume so correct that the item I cite in the OP could name the clothing items (and the Chinese also had raised-sole wooden shoes, even if they didn’t call them “geta”). At least they didn’t give him a queue. He’s there because Seuss wanted to make his parade increasingly exotic. That said, it’s definitely not PC today because it’s based on old stereotypes about how people are pigeonholed by old ideas about how they’re odd and different. The almost-simplest way would have been to remove the drawing from the overall picture and rewrite the verse referring to him, but it’s simpler still to withdraw publication.
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During the second world war, lots of insulting caricatures of Germans and Italians showed up, as well. They were, after all, the “bad guys”, and people didn’t have qualms about dehumanizing them. Times have changed this way, too – there’s less appetite for doing that today, I think, but that’s a discussion for another time. My point is that the Japanese weren’t the only ones given that treatment People aren’t fond of these today. Disney doesn’t re-release the Donald Duck cartoon “Der Fuhrer’s Face” anymore. Warner Brothers wartime cartoons are among their banned list. I once saw a documentary on wartime cartoons that didn’t actually show any cartoons.
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Look for a lot more of this sort of thing in the future. Cartoonists actively look for different and interesting things to draw, for obvious reasons. That invariably lead to “exotic” foreign lands and people in foreign garb. A lot of that is going to be seen as culturally insensitive and racially stereotyping. And a lot of it is, but a lot arguably is not. And when you start to separate the two, you’ll have controversies. I’ve already seen complaints about the depictions in Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics, most of which I think are unjustified. On the other hand, I’m amazed at what they got away with in DC comics in the 1960s and early 1970s. Again, a topic for another time.
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Fox news is taking Biden to task for not mentioning Dr. Seuss at yesterday’s Read Across America Day – Fox News asks Jen Psaki about President Biden's outrageous disregard for Dr. Seuss
Librarian here. If I Ran the Zoo is the only book I’ve withdrawn in a 30 year career, and this happened years ago. I discussed the book with a group of 5th and 6th graders as an example of a book that was considered “ok” at the time it was published, but not in the present.
The very concept of “exotic” is non-Woke now.
https://www.thelamron.com/posts/2018/11/8/exotic-is-offensive-wrongly-objectifies-non-white-people
(As an aside back to Japanese shoes, take a look on Google Images at “tengu geta.”)
Sorry – I disagree wit this on many counts. That paper is using it in a different sense than the way it is normally used. “Exotic” means “different from here”. If nothing is exotic, then everything is the same.
It’s an ideal to treat people the same everywhere, not favoring anyone or discriminating against them. But to not recognize that places are different, with different practices, feels, flavors, etc. is absurd, and denies reality. If nothing is exotic there is no need for travel or for trade. “Exotic” is always in reference to wherever you are. Boston is exotic to someone in Europe, just as Japan in exotic to someone in Boston. To call something “exotic” is not to declare Western society the norm.
Any thoughts as to why the current folk decided the offending material could not be edited out?
Would strike me as not terribly challenging to either delete the words/pictures, or to commission new, inoffensive substitutes. Doing so would allow the books to continue to be published, earning $ for the owners. Could be accompanied by a forward/notation/etc. informing folk that some aspects of the book had been changed. Purists could avoid them.
Or is the thought that one currently offensive image taints the entire book? If so, why not consider his entire ouvre tainted?
The real world doesn’t work that way, sorry.
I’m Chinese American. Thinking back on these books brings back memories of a confused childhood where books introduced in school created weird lessons to me about what Chinese meant. Of course now I know it was all bullshit, but as a child these books presented depictions of what it meant to be Chinese to me, which was a confusing mess. What is worse, is they presented what it means to be Chinese to my classmates which wasn’t great for me either. And don’t get me started on movies.
While my parents’ English skills are excellent, not every Asian-American’s parent is fluent in English. Also, I was introduced to these books in school by teachers, white teachers who don’t know better.
I also feel that racism towards Asians gets a pass where racism towards other races is taken more seriously.