Seuss drew many of what today would be called racist stereotypes, but every cartoonist of the time was also drawing them. The Japanese were our enemy, and it’s typical in war to portray your enemy in those terms.
The comic strip was about a working class Irish character. Occasionally portrayed blacks as coons and n!ggers:
https://goo.gl/images/Hy7m8S
From what I researched, the Yellow Kid cartoon is a “mischievous, shaved headed Irish tenement kid in handmedown clothes.” This slum image has largely been forgotten, or before our time.
So the Yellow Kid is the first example of cultural appropriation?
But, of course, it’s not the best comic strip of its era.
ISWYDT
The Yellow Kid ended in 1898 and that other strip didn’t begin until 1905. Aren’t those different eras? 
Strange how the only complaints I’ve ever heard about the Yellow Kid are from white people.
How come nobody ever bitches about the German stereotypes in the Katzenjammer Kids?
Why is this zombie thread re-energized?
I’m surprised that more people aren’t outraged by Mario’s outrageous Italian accent.
Until his recent explanation I thought he meant that the Kid was mentally disabled, which that wiseassed little punk is constantly proving wrong.
It was still in use in Anthropology when I got my degree (1976) to pigeonhole people of East Asian heritage. It’s just too broad to be of any real use.
“Look, name, and context?” His look is that of a kid of the time, with a shaved head because he was getting deloused. His name was Mickey Dugan, as Irish as you could get, with a long career of ward heeler ahead of him.
Did you read my link on "breaching?" Look at many photos and portraits of the time. Small kids wore dresses/nightshirts. Buster Brown and Max and Moritz were older and housebroken.
When I was a kid, I thought the Yellow Kid was Asian. I knew yellow was a slur for Chinese and he looked like Connie from Terry and the Pirates (a pretty overtly racist caricature, I came to realize later). Throw in the “R for L” slang and it made sense. I never saw him referred to as Mickey Dugan, so I didn’t know his name wasn’t just Yellow Kid.
When I learned about yellow journalism (at around 9 or 10 years old I think) it took me awhile to separate the two uses of yellow as distinct things, not related in any way except that they were both slurs and that the Yellow in Yellow Kid was not a slur at all, despite him appearing in the newspaper which spawned the term and him appearing (to me) to be Chinese.
Because it was revived by a new board member, who undoubtedly found it on a Google search, and felt compelled to register on the board in order to say what a dozen people had said three years ago, while also throwing in some choice ethnic slurs, as well.
[Moderating]
Luckee, it’s not clear here whether you’re intending the word “niggers” to refer to black people in general, or specifically to caricatures of black people. Because of this ambiguity, it’s best to avoid using the word entirely. And no, the fact that you replaced a letter with a punctuation mark isn’t relevant: That only works on simpleminded automated text scanners, not on humans capable of reading.
He doesn’t look Asian to me.
He DOES look like a freak that would fit perfectly in American Horror Story though.
How this creepy little bastard ever got popular is beyond me.
Do you understand that I am not posting in between your posts? You keep answering things anyway.
Not only that but the Yellow Kid was 125 years ago, and for modern children, usually learned about as a footnote when reading histories of cartooning. The back story was not a part of this discovery for me, either because it was absent in the book I read, or not memorable to me at the time, and examples were rare. He looked culturally “other” and vaguely mongoloid, and from there you have the cultural associations of being a US child in the 20th century.
Are there any other european male characters in literature who weren’t breached? It’s a point you are making I suppose, but I think you are exaggerating the “obviousness” of it.
Also I should say that the connection made for later 20th c. children, when reading about the Yellow Kid with limited examples, was probably with Alfred E Neuman, who is portrayed as a kind of defective savant. When you don’t have google the world is a mysterious place sometimes.
Do you understand that I originated “dropsplaining?”
So you are admitting that you are viewing this phenomenon solely through the eyes of a 21st Century person and are projecting your preconceptions onto people of 125 years ago, with no eye to history? I’m glad he got that straight. :rolleyes:
READ my link. Breeching is done when the kid is reliably toilet trained and can manage the complexities of unbuttoning and buttoning his britches (breeches). Most literature isn’t about toddlers, but my link shows many portraits of young boys in dresses. The “obviousness” comes from that’s how young boys were dressed! But you want literature, so I present Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which Tristram’s parents take to the bed twice (like everything else in this book, why they do it twice is explained in excruciating detail) to discuss whether the time has come for his breeching. Your homework over the holiday break is to read the book (hope you don’t have any plans) and find that section. This is due January 2, 2019 at 8:00 AM.
No! I was a well read 20th century child and you are projecting your 21st century google enhanced understanding of the 19th century on me, goldurnit!
In the 20th century we were bathing in racial stereotypes and had been for all of US history. (Was 1895 an exception?!?!) We didn’t have expertise on the plots of Yellow kid stories. We forgot somehow that the fact that our great great grandfathers had worn dresses as toddlers meant something about this character. How could this happen! We failed!
The pictures of little boys in dresses I’ve seen, from biographies, seem much younger than the kid. The Yellow kid had a lot of agency and seemed well old enough to be toilet trained. I would not normally make the connection between photos of infants and this character. Now, under zombie attack I will submit.
So–once more into the breech?