Cancelling Dr. Seuss

I get it that Dr. Seuss wasn’t cancelled, 5 or 6 of his early books were instead.  And maybe that was appropriate, and reasonable; that’s what I’m going to discuss.  Obviously this is my take; that goes without saying.  

For issues like this I think it makes sense to keep any potentially objective conclusions or stances separate from personal opinions that are subjective, that could as easily be taken in different ways, that only represent preferences or differences in perspective.  It's helpful for mapping out complex or problematic issues, keeping the layers of baseline context straight.  There's nothing wrong with having strong personal preferences, feelings, and opinions, but it's best to keep that clear as not necessarily "right for all," since the project here is to identify finer points of perspective and communication.

The background is simple enough:  Dr. Seuss’s publisher dropped distribution of some of his works.  They were deemed racist, and unacceptable to today’s audience, primarily because they depicted racist images.  In particular depictions of black people and Asians drew on offensive stereotype images.  A Snopes review fills in more of that scope, effectively concluding that he was racist (implicitly).  Was he racist?  Maybe, but let’s not jump ahead.  And let’s call Dr. Seuss just Suess from here on; he wasn’t really a doctor, and that was some sort of pen name (presumably).

not so much better after the white-washing, but maybe not that bad initially

Part of what informs my perspective is being alive for awhile; I’m 52, so I can vaguely remember some of the 1970s, and I’m really a product of the 80s.  Living in a different country gives you a different perspective on race or nationality issues, as I do now, in Thailand.  I'm the minority here.  In Hawaii too; that was interesting.

Edit:  in this initial post form I didn't cite much for external sources, besides images from a Snopes article showing the background and two quotes framing Seuss's own take and some background.  A number of additional image and background citation in an end section add to that, identifying Seuss's own take on this matter even more completely. 

Before getting into sides or perspectives let's consider if "cancellation" is right context for what is occurring.

Questioning the cancel culture framing

In a good discussion of this someone quite familiar in tea circles asserted that this isn't a case of cancellation, as the football player kneeling in protest losing his career was (kind of the general culture-war theme; opposing liberal and conservative versions of rejections).  Instead it was just eliminating media content that is no longer relevant and acceptable.  

I'd cite that post link and give credit but people are as likely to not want to be mentioned in relation to sensitive views, and it doesn't change things adding an attribution.  And this doesn't reflect a proprietary creative contribution, it's just a framing statement.

To me that assertion kind of works, at first glance, but we still need to question if it's as well to update old media by removing access to it (effectively cancelling it; all of this just moves around the terms).  And it stops at the first glance.

I wanted to start here with Seuss’s side.  It’s backwards, intuitively; it would make more sense to flesh out the two different ways of looking at this first (or however many ways there seem to be).  Maybe I’ll just sketch a few stances as context then go straight to a statement from him that seems to imply where he stood on racism.

A few potential modern perspectives could apply:

-One extreme:  racism is ok; I’m a racist.  This really should be a minority view but it’s out there.  Obviously I'm not going to discuss that much here.

-Conservative, but not as extreme:  stop cancelling things, and ease up with the political correctness.  People could filter what they expose themselves and their children to without this complete removal of access.

-The other extreme:  anything remotely racist or inappropriate by today’s standards should be relegated to the scrap-heap of cultural history.  Maybe Tom Sawyer would get a pass, because it was clearly sympathetic to the slave / black perspective, or maybe not, maybe that should go.  Probably that works as a cut-off; anyone as far on the correct / liberal-left / inclusive side as Samuel Clemens had been is probably fine.  The general idea is that children shouldn’t be exposed to anything that doesn’t match modern sensibilities, which could distort their own.  Adults could view such material within the scope of studying cultural history but otherwise it’s irrelevant in relation to modern appreciation.  We should basically cancel it.

-Moderate (as I see it):  we should be able to look past or re-interpret past perspectives that don’t match our own, and view that material from our own lens and worldview, instead of cancelling it.  It may even be helpful to expose children to such content and explain what it is, to keep them open and primed to identifying and experiencing what doesn’t work in the modern world, and how perspectives change over time.  Analyzing older content that doesn't work now could turn up a different perspective than the black and white "racist / not racist" sort of divide we generally accept.

Suess's own position

This passage cites an interesting Seuss quote addressing a related issue, framed as a citation, which might be interesting to look up as well, so I'll include that part too:

How Dr. Seuss Responded to Critics Who Called Out His Racism

...Seuss actually has an essay, which I put up on my blog, where he thinks about racist humor and argues against it. It’s titled “ … But for Grown-Ups Laughing Isn’t Any Fun” and was published in 1952. He argues that writing for grown-ups is less interesting because they’re culturally conditioned. They have something called “conditioned laughter.” Here’s the passage.

This conditioned laughter the grown-ups taught you depended entirely upon their conditions. Financial conditions. Political conditions. Racial, religious and social conditions. You began to laugh at people your family feared or despised—people they felt inferior to, or people they felt better than.

If your father said a man named Herbert Hoover was an ass, and asses should be laughed at, you laughed at Herbert Hoover. Or, if you were born across the street, you laughed at Franklin Roosevelt. Who they were, you didn’t know. But the local ground rules said you were to laugh at them. In the same way, you were supposed to guffaw when someone told a story which proved that Swedes are stupid, Scots are tight, Englishmen are stuffy and the Mexicans never wash.

Your laughs were beginning to sound a little tinny. Then you learned it was socially advantageous to laugh at Protestants and/or Catholics …

That same work adds more depth to the images and framing that is problematic, related to the image I already included:

There are racist caricatures of people of African descent, people of Asian descent, of Arab descent. For example, at the end of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street [1937], the version that was published in the 1930s had a page that said, “I’ve seen a Chinaman who eats with sticks.” The man was colored yellow and had a pigtail, wearing one of those triangular hats. He cleaned that image up a bit in the 1978 edition, cut off the pigtail and removed the color, changed the language to “I’ve seen a Chinese man who eats with sticks.”

Unless that citation is completely wrong there must have been three versions, because the two already shown here change from "I've seen a Chinese boy who eats with sticks" to referring to a Chinese man.

In the first passage he’s basically saying that racism is bad, and also rejecting quite a bit of political division based on shared culture and learned bias.  That latter point is probably even more relevant today than it was in 1952 when he said it.  He doesn’t say that he’s not a racist there, and that he never was.  Whether or not the part about a Chinaman was an expression of racism requires more interpretation than it first seems to, to me.  I don't think it makes racism any more acceptable for it to have been expressed in 1937 but the dating is still an interesting factor in this story, something that needs to be considered further.

It’s also interesting how in today’s world someone might feel a need to explain that they aren't racist; it wouldn’t go without saying.  Can I justify that I’m not really opposing this cancellation (where this will sort of land, conditionally) because I’m sympathetic to racism?  Or that I’m not a racist?  Let’s make a start on that.

What if I could claim the following:

-I was raised as a liberal, including not tolerating any expression of intolerance from others, taught to openly and clearly reject such expressions when hearing them.  Too vague, right?  What if some of my perspective is still not up to date, or fully corrected?  That first part reminds me of one of my earliest childhood memories of my parents causing quite a stir at my grandparents' house because my grandmother called a Brazil nut a "nigger toe."  That was just the common term for them when she grew up, but my parents weren't having it, that being expressed to us.  I never heard "the N word" there again, but then I never had in relation to people before then.

-I’ve dated an African woman and married a Thai; my kids are half Asian.  That doesn’t seem to go far, does it?  Someone could be quite racist and do those things; it would just relate to how they related to those people.  A black person could be racist against black people, under the right circumstances.

-I don’t really know many white people as in-real-life friends now; I’m living within an Asian culture, for quite awhile.

And so it goes, on from there.  It’s hard to build up the proper credentials to really put yourself in the liberal right (probably only a bit easier for conservative scope), hence virtue signaling does actually have a functional purpose, if you see group inclusion as a function.

The point related to Seuss, tied to defending him, can take a few forms.  Let’s break that down.

1. He may have been somewhat racist in his younger years but clearly moved past it, related to being instrumental in teaching against it later on in his works.  It’s a subtheme of that to conclude that he was only a little racist, adopting imagery that wasn’t extreme at all in his time, in the same way that US Founding Fathers didn't completely reject slavery back in the 1700s. I’m skeptical that either works as a reflection of likely reality, but that is where most people seemed to move to right away.  

2. Regardless of his perspective the work is useful as a teaching point for kids, even if clearly and simply just racist, so cancelling it is inappropriate (already touched on earlier).  It’s not actually a defense, it just sets aside his own take as irrelevant, and by-passes the cancellation move.

3. He may have been trying to oppose those racist images by pointing out the problem with them.  I suspect some form of this is the actual case.  He might have became a lot clearer on what he was opposed to or accepted later on, and more than that he might have gained skill at expressing this opposition.  Or both.  He couldn’t really reject racism so directly, because on the earliest side it was nearly half a century before political correctness and those forms of images and expressions became commonly rejected by society.  He would've needed to take a less direct approach to rejecting norms that he saw as not ok (if that was the intent, which all this never does finally conclude).  It's relevant to keep track of the main context being cartoon images in kids books, which is not the right place for a text discussion of social norms.  

Edit:  he expressed regret later in life for creating these images, so it seems like option 1 is essentially how that went.  He was a racist by late 20th century standards, just perhaps within a mainstream perspective of his day.  But that's still a position of accepting unfair and inappropriate racial bias that could have been identified as wrong, even at that time, even if it fell within a general norm.

 

photo credit USA Today article; this was published around 1929

The Civil Rights movement in the 60s definitely related to the same rejection of racism theme becoming mainstream (Rosa Parks actually rejected a seat in the back of the bus in 1955; it started earlier), but it didn’t evolve to take that form of rejection until some time later.  My grade school mascot, an "Indian," was changed in the late 70s, so it had started then, only a decade and a half after the start of that broad movement.  The mascot became a "Super-Berry," a superhero version of a cranberry; different.

Seuss used animal or fictional creature images later on, since he couldn’t work with minority images to express or reject the same themes.  I see this as a development of maturity in his form of expression, his choice of communication method.  In this he could also by-pass addressing gender issues indirectly, because these animals or fictional characters didn’t need to have clearly expressed gender, when it wasn’t relevant to what he was expressing (in that same Slate article):

...He was also really resistant to criticisms of his work as sexist and wouldn’t change it on those grounds. He most famously said of Alison Lurie, who wrote a critique of gender and Seuss’ works in the New York Review of Books, something along these lines: Tell her most of my characters are animals, and if she can identify their sex, I’ll remember her in my will!

It seems like this modern discussion of this book cancellation is missing considering these levels of details and perspective.  The discussion I’ve seen, even from media commentary, has moved straight on to “wow, Suess was a little bit racist.”  I’m just not convinced.  I’m not even convinced he expressed bad judgment; it depends on his intention. 

By today's standards of course he did use terrible judgement, but I mean that in setting up opposition to images that were common then using those images wouldn't be problematic at all.  Getting back to the conclusion of that Slate article, that's exactly what they concluded:

Some people look at that and think, “We just must be wrong about Seuss.” That’s because they see racism as an either/or—like, you’re on Team Racism or you’re not. But you can do anti-racist work and also reproduce racist ideas in your work. And Seuss wasn’t aware that his visual imagination was so steeped in the cultures of American racism. He was doing in some of his books what he was trying to oppose in others.

This interpretation is definitely one possibility.  It's worth keeping in mind that the people who created the US Constitution also owned slaves, and surely were very clear on that contradiction.  I can't say why more of them didn't reject it more completely or more often than they did, but they didn't.

Placing cultural norm critique in recent examples

It's hard to find a comparable example of this somewhat blatant racism being ingrained in the mainstream today, isn't it?  Inclusiveness has extended far enough that low-hanging fruit of most striking examples isn't around.  Some people are still completely racist; I don't mean that.  I mean that within the least racist half it's hard to find comparable themes.  

Someone might see being ageist or ableist as new frontiers for subtle discrimination, or not so subtle but still accepted examples.  But a caricature version of old or disabled people shouldn't be used in similar unacceptable ways.  Shouldn't be; of course it still could happen.  Eventually saying "you kids get off my lawn" in jest might be seen as the same kind of inappropriate framing as comparing a Brazil nut to a black person's toe.

It's possible to go a step further, to look at examples of humor from the last 20 to 30 years that was designed to reject stereotyping through humor, but in a form that just wouldn't fly in terms of todays sensibilities.  

Two examples of 90s comedy come to mind.  In Living Color did comedy sketches about gay and disabled people that were intended to both poke fun at and reject negative images, using an approach that wouldn't be tolerated today (about gays in the military or a "handiman" superhero character).  Saturday Night Live did an Ambiguously Gay Duo sketch apparently intended to lampoon gay stereotypes.  Or maybe it was just in very poor taste (the last, I mean, or maybe all of it).  It could be hard to tell the difference between being in poor taste and not "pulling it off," just not being funny.  That Gay Duo superhero example was kind of a stupid premise; it's odd that it made it on the show at all.  Somehow it was supposed to be funny that maybe Batman and Robin were really a couple.

Edit:  in adding to this I'm reminded of an "Airplane" movie skit about interpreting "jive talk" of black people, adding subtitles to that scene.  In retrospect that was a clear expression of racism, just as the "blaxploitation" films of that era could rightfully be interpreted.  It didn't violate a social norm at that time.  Including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a positively framed character doesn't necessarily offset or resolve this depiction; it just was what it was.

Can we conclude that those television based examples were clearly trying to oppose extremist stereotypes that they were rejecting, through comedy, highlighting that absurdity? Maybe, maybe not. Today they would definitely be interpreted as an expression of that unacceptable bias instead, of racism.  Why the difference?  In general that societal norm is no longer so universal (bias against homosexuals or the disabled), so the indirect opposition just doesn't work. Of course we already know that gay people may or may not express the stereotypical mannerisms, and that handicapped people are exactly like everyone else, except within the scope of their disability.  That should have also been the case in the early 1990s but it definitely wasn't as universal a perspective.

In short, you can't make fun of a universal misunderstanding that has already been largely resolved.  Today SNL could do a skit making fun of Muslim stereotype preconceptions, because those are more universal, but the current cultural climate rejects use of such form in general.  It couldn't portray the characters negatively in any way, eliminating part of the form.  I've seen that kind of skit produced by SNL, about random airport security screening.  But it had to be so positive and limited that it eliminated most of the form typical of the Sacha Baron Cohen characters, like Borat, or the lesser known "Aladeen," related to Muslim stereotype.  

All of those Cohen character examples may or may not work as comedy or effective social commentary, depending on your perspective.  I think the Adam Sandler "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" movie is a good example of a film getting all that completely wrong.  It's not clear there was any somewhat indirect social commentary implied; it only made use of stereotypes, versus making fun of them, without offering any plausible redeeming observations.

The connection back to the Seuss theme is clear enough, right?  It seems likely to me that this was an expression of social commentary and critique, not racism.  Maybe just not an effective example of it.

Between the time he wrote the problematic Mulberry Zoo work in 1937 and the Cat in the Hat in 1957 maybe his skill at addressing such issues changed, or maybe a conventional framing of the ideas and images shifted.  Or both.  Maybe he was only trying to reject racism the whole time, in different forms.  Or it's conceivable that he could have went from being a bit racist to not as racist, or not racist at all, the common current media take.

It's really hard to tell what was happening on his end, but it helps to at least think it all through a bit before passing judgement.

Post-script:  referencing other research and discussion

Mentioning this link brought up more commentary about other media review of this subject, that adds good input about Seuss's later life feelings about these images, and a timeline for when different types of racist or racially insensitive depictions were published.  The earlier depiction of a black person with apelike features was probably published around 1929, but a clear date wasn't cited for that, just references to what seem to be related works.  This similar cartoon was dated:

photo credit Snopes article

The idea here isn't that racism was ok and normal back in the 1920s, although it probably was a lot more accepted and universal than in the 1950s or 60s.  It's to set up a timeline for a transition of Seuss's views and image publication practices over time.  Early works were more racist; that seems clear enough.  But this image from wartime is only more subtle in comparison, and targeted at a different group of people, not free of the same concern.

published in February, 1942 (BBC article source)

This BBC article citation lists indirect input from Seuss and direct statement from him about this issue and these depictions:

“I think he would find it a legitimate criticism, because I remember talking to him about it at least once and him saying that things were done a certain way back then,” Ted Owens, a great-nephew of Geisel, told The New York Times. “Characterizations were done, and he was a cartoonist and he tended to adopt those. And I know later in his life he was not proud of those at all.”

Seuss followed up a 1976 interview for his former college, Dartmouth, with a handwritten note in which he partially apologised for the cartoons. “When I look at them now they’re hurriedly and embarrassingly badly drawn, and they’re full of many snap judgements that every political cartoonist has to make… The one thing I do like about them, however, is their honesty and their frantic fervor. I believed the USA would go down the drain if we listened to the America Firstisms… I probably was intemperate in my attacks on them. But they almost disarmed this country at a time it was obviously about to be destroyed, and I think I helped a little bit – not much, but some – in stating the fact that we were in a war and we damned well better ought to do something about it.”

It's not exactly an apology or expressed regret over using racist imagery.  It's probably telling to include both the date, 1976, and the context, that of political cartoons, in this account.  It was common for cartoonish and overly exaggerated forms and images to be used in political cartoons at that time, not just of a wartime enemy or "hated foreign race."  Current political leaders and essentially every character in those works would be drawn as exaggerated cartoons.  It's highly insensitive by 2021 standards, or even the perspective of the mid 1990s, but drawing Herbert Hoover or Roosevelt in a similar way wouldn't be regarded as racist, even though it would essentially be the same thing.

FDR cartoon from 1935 (credit)

modern Carter and Obama cartoon, not different than those in the 70s of Carter (credit)

So it seems Seuss did go through a personal perspective transformation, and one that paralleled changes in standard American perceptions of race.  Highly negative black image depictions and racism itself were probably far more common in the late 1920s through some of the 1930.  Seuss didn't completely leave behind this type of imagery, using a related form as wartime propaganda in advocating that the US enter World War 2.  In retrospect that was the right call; staying out of that war was not a practical option, not in the long term best interests of the US.  The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor caused that shift in popular perception, not political cartoons.  But then it wouldn't have really fit with the style of political cartoons to not depict the Japanese characters in an exaggerated and cartoonish way, as shown in the 1935 and modern era political cartoon versions prior.

  

the transitions happen in Thailand, but they are behind (photo credit and story)