Academics must be running out of books to ban.
Diversity experts are so desperate to kill the darlings of children’s literature that they’ll write their own fiction just to smear Dr. Seuss.
Just look at the title of a “study” published in a peer-reviewed literature journal last month: “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.” It makes you wonder whether it isn’t part of some elaborate prank.
Theodor Seuss Geisel wasn’t perfect, and you don’t have to tell any falsehoods to recognize that certain themes in his writing and political cartoons are cause for concern. Black characters in his books are depicted in indigenous garb and Asians have buck teeth. Worse, he created anti-Japanese propaganda for the Army during World War II, once depicting the Japanese as monkeys and referring to them by the common derogatory term “Japs.” He even drew a cartoon portraying Japanese Americans as traitors.
Long before World War II, in college, Geisel had also drawn a cartoon where Jews had large noses and Jewish merchants haggled over money. The study mentions this and other legitimate concerns with Geisel and his work.
But in some ways, Geisel was a champion of diversity: He was vehemently anti-Nazi, and he said his opposition to anti-Semitism inspired the book The Sneetches, where some of the mythical creatures think they’re better than others based on their appearance.
Scholars have previously argued that Horton Hears a Who! is an apology for Geisel’s anti-Japanese views. But this study’s authors think they know better. “Regardless of the intention of the book,” they write, “the impact is that it reinforces themes of White supremacy, Orientalism, and White saviorism.”
Come again?
The book and its famous line, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” may serve as an allegory for the superpower America and the island of Japan, experts say. Geisel wrote it after a visit to Japan and dedicated the book to a professor he met there, “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan.”
But as far as the authors of this study were concerned, that really just means it’s racist: “It positions the Whos in a deficit-based framework as the dominant, paternalistic Horton enacts the White Savior Industrial Complex.”
So, even if Horton Hears a Who! is actually an apology for being anti-Japanese, it’s anti-Japanese, because Horton helps the Japanese, and helping people is racist.
“Note that Horton is the one who decides that the Whos need to be saved in the first place, and that he himself defines and dictates the actions needed to save them (including when he directs the Whos to prove their existence),” the study continues.
So, the Whos should’ve told Horton how to save them. Or maybe Horton should have just let them be.
And the climax of the story, where the little people prove that they exist so the picture book can have a little drama, somehow dehumanizes them.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a clear-eyed look at Dr. Seuss. But the author has so much more to offer children than the fake problems that academics are reading into his work.
After Geisel recognized his portrayal of a Chinese character in And To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street was offensive, he revised it. “I had a gentleman with a pigtail,” he said, according to the biography Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel. “I colored him yellow and called him a Chinaman. That’s the way things were fifty years ago. In later editions I refer to him as a Chinese man. I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail.”
The study’s authors mention the update, but they don’t provide Geisel’s rationale. Even when he tried to atone for his sins, it wasn’t enough. When it comes to racial atonement in the world of literature, it never is.
