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Further implications
The following is a slightly abbreviated version of an opinion piece published in The Shorthorn, the campus newspaper for the University of Texas at Arlington. The author of the comment is student Katecey Harrell. The piece was published on March 24, 2021.The full text can be accessed at
Theodor Seuss Geisel, known commonly as Dr. Seuss, is beloved by many for inspiring children to fall in love with reading. Most of us grew up with his fun rhymes and wacky worlds or were at least exposed to them in classrooms. However, the man behind iconic children's literature is being reconsidered despite decades of adoration in the cultural consciousness and school curriculums.
On March 2, Dr. Seuss' birthday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased the publication and licensing of six of his titles, disowning them for "[portraying] people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.". Critics in the news media would have us believe that it's a long-overdue reckoning with Dr. Seuss' alleged racism. However, they're actually symptomatic of a broader cultural, iconoclastic trend. Instead of allowing nuanced conversations that consider the time in which a piece of art or story is made, some choose to obliterate the past and its artifacts, hence affronting our sensibilities today. They see themselves as disruptors of systemic racism and interrogators of structures of power, but they're really a part of a culture of moral superiority, wielded to justify hostility and assert authority.
The 2019 study, titled "The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books," highlighted alleged racism. With its perspective that literature should be examined for its underlying connections to racism, the study infers the "reinforcement of racial bias" in children who read Dr. Seuss. The study authors, motivated to find offense, found racialized messages and problematic characters in almost all of Dr. Seuss' books. Although most characters in Dr. Seuss' books are not even human, the study identified 2 percent of human characters being people of colour, who all manifest in "stereotypical, dehumanizing, or subordinate ways". For example, the study points to the depiction of Asian characters in If I Ran the Zoo, where Asian people are represented wearing conical hats or carrying the gun-toting white male narrator, which presumably illustrates white dominance...
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, many Americans were swept up in Anti-Japanese resentment, Dr. Seuss included. As a political cartoonist, Dr. Seuss produced hundreds of works supporting the war effort during World War II, criticizing Adolf Hitler and advocating the civil rights of Jews and Black people. Unfortunately, his support of internment camps and accusations of Japanese Americans as spies resulted in his breathtakingly racist, anti-Asian political cartoons.
After the war in 1953, Dr. Seuss visited Japan and witnessed the devastation caused by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. His apology for his racist sentiments came in the form of "Horton Hears a Who!" in 1954, a story about the titular elephant's struggle to protect microscopic people living on a speck on a flower, dedicated to a Japanese friend. The book's inspirational main theme is that "A person is a person, no matter how small" - a theme indicative of the positivity that made much of Dr. Seuss' later books classics.
Dr. Seuss is proof of not only the human tendency to make mistakes, but also the ability to learn from them. When we feel entitled to look down on our predecessors, we should remind ourselves that people in the future will judge us by their benchmarks and fostering scorn for the past will only condemn us to the same treatment.
We must remember that progress is not made in a vacuum. Acknowledging the past, placed in the context of its flaws and its contributions to the present, is what keeps us intellectually honest and vigilant. This is not a defence of racism, but rather a nuanced recognition that great art from the past is also a product of its times.