On Tuesday, the editorial imprint dr. seuss enterprises announced that it would stop publishing six books by dr. seuss that include offensive images. In the statement, which was published on the author’s birthday, the publisher said it made its decision after working with a panel of experts, including educators, in service of its mission “to support all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion and friendship.”
The six books on the shelves are comparatively obscure works in the seuss canon: and to think i saw it on mulberry street, if i run the zoo, mcelligot’s pool, on beyond zebra!, scrambled eggs super!, and the cat’s beloved classics like the cat in the hat and oh the places you’ll go! remain intact. But the decision, which caused a stir in the right-wing infosphere, is part of a broader debate sweeping the children’s literary community.
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for decades, the works of dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Seuss Geisel) have long been considered iconic childhood classics and bastions of liberalism. They’re praised for their celebration of all that makes us different, and Seuss books like Horton Hears a Who and The Sneetches feature frequently in children’s anti-racism curricula.
but in recent years, dr. The Seuss brand has lost some of its shine. Reading Across America Day, an annual day of programming designed by the National Education Association to get kids excited about reading, traditionally takes place around March 2, Geisel’s birthday. Usually features lots of Cat in the Hat paraphernalia and other beloved Seuss trademarks. but when the contract of the nea with dr. Seuss Enterprises went out of business in 2018, opting not to renew the terms, leading to much less Dr. seuss merch is distributed to different schools. and this year, the nea has moved away from dr. seuss completely. Instead, it’s using Reading Day across America to highlight children’s books written by authors of color.
and now dr. seuss enterprises has decided to stop publishing six of dr. the seuss books, all of which include racist cartoons.
In particular, in If I Ran the Zoo, the narrator states his intention to display a “boss” (illustrated as a man in a turban) at the zoo; a couple of African characters are represented as monkeys; and a group of Asian characters, described as “slant-eyed helpers” from “countries no one can spell” carry a caged animal on their heads. the other books contain similar orientalist caricatures.
other questionable images are found throughout dr. Seuss’s work, including some of his best-loved classics. And outside of his children’s books, in his career as a political cartoonist and publicist, Dr. Seuss frequently drew racist cartoons and used racial slurs in his subtitles.
So, as the children’s literature community grapples with how to make its canon more diverse and inclusive, Dr. seuss has come for a particular reexamination. these books have become something of a case study in what to do with brand authors as the social context surrounding their work changes. or, more specifically: what do you do with a set of beloved classics that explicitly promote values like tolerance and love for all, but are also strewn with racist ideas?
something from dr. Seuss’s political cartoons were unabashedly liberal and ahead of his time. others were savagely racist.
dr. Seuss’s work for adults includes some clearly racist imagery. Husband-and-wife team Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, who run the Social Justice Library for Conscious Children, developed a study of Dr. seuss’s story of racism presenting a small sample.
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an announcement dr. seuss drew for the insecticide flit featured a disgruntled white woman telling a black man, “you have a job, are you worthless? say, ni***er, when you have one job a week, mosquitoes will flutter brush their teeth and like it! ‘” Dr. Seuss tended to draw blacks as cannibals or monkeys, and they weren’t the only racial group he caricatured.
Beginning long before the period leading up to World War II, Dr. Seuss frequently drew Japanese people with animalistic features who were violent threats to America, referred to them as “Japs” and captioned them with joke lines that replaced his rs with ls. “very scary jap-in-the-box,” reads the caption of a cartoon of a Japanese man climbing out of a box labeled “Japanese war threat.” he also drew caricatures of Jews with oversized noses who caused chaos everywhere by demanding lower prices.
in particular, dr. Seuss also drew cartoons denouncing Jim Crow’s laws, the policies of Nazi Germany, and American isolationism. dr Seuss’s political cartoons, writes Maus author Art Spiegelman in the foreword to the 1999 book Dr. seuss goes to war, “criticizes isolationism, racism, and antisemitism with a conviction and fervor that is missing from most other American editorial pages of the time.” in fact, dr. Seuss, Spiegelman argues, drew “virtually the only editorial cartoons outside of the black and communist press that condemned Jim Crow’s military policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism.”
dr. seuss was on the right side of history in a lot of ways, and he also drew a lot of really virulently racist stuff. that is his legacy as a cartoonist.
But what does that background mean for his legacy as a children’s author?
there are very few characters of color in dr. seuss children’s books the ones that do appear are racist caricatures.
there aren’t that many racial caricatures in dr. seuss children’s books, mainly because there aren’t that many non-white characters in dr. seuss children’s books In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens counted 45 characters of color among the 2,240 human characters that appear in Dr. all 50 seuss books, which works out to just 2 percent. notably, all of those characters are male. there are no girls or women of color at dr. seuss canon.
and when characters of color appear in these books, they appear as racial caricatures. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens found that the 45 color characters were subservient, exoticized, dehumanized, or a combination of all three. dr Seuss’s characters of color drive carriages for white characters who wield whips, wear turbans and “paddy hats,” and never speak out loud. most are orientalist caricatures, and the two that are not are those African characters drawn as monkeys in if I ran the zoo.
and dr. Seuss’ interest in racial caricatures influences the rest of his work in ways no longer visible to casual readers, especially when it comes to the Cat in the Hat, that icon of surrealism and Seuss’s wacky humor.
There is a classic origin story for the cat in the hat. According to Seuss biographers Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr. Seuss was inspired by a trip to the editors of him. He had been assigned the task of writing a reading manual that would make reluctant readers eager to learn, and he was surprised to see the appearance of the elevator operator: a woman with white gloves and a wicked smile. she is this woman, says the legend, who inspired the cat.
In his book-length study Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, English teacher Philip Nel points out that the woman in question, Annie Williams, was black. and nel argues that dr. Seuss, who performed in minstrel shows in college, used Williams as the basis for a character whose iconic appearance would become rooted in imagery of the American minstrel show and blackface.
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“the cat’s parasol (which he uses as a cane) and his outrageous fashion sense link him to zip coon, that vain ‘northern dandy black’,” writes nel. “his bright red floppy tie recalls the polka dot ties of blackface fred astaire in swing time (1936) and blackface mickey rooney in babies in arms (1939). His red and white striped hat is reminiscent of Rooney’s hat in the same movie or the minstrel clowns’ hats in the silent movie Bloomingdale’s Asylum.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that the cat in the hat is definitively racist, or that someone has to be racist to read the cat in the hat to their children. (I would suggest, however, that this context makes the plot in the sequel where the cat smears ink all over the house and then the kids yell at him to kill the stains a bit awkward, in light of the racial history of the way blacks , dirt, and ink are associated in American pop culture).
but the example of the cat in the hat is illustrative. shows how a man immersed in racist ideas and images could end up reproducing the same images in a medium as innocent as a book designed to teach children to read, all the while upholding liberal ideals about tolerance and love for all. and shows how those images can float subliminally through our popular culture, divorced from their context, without us being fully aware that they are there.
Contrary to Fox News’ claims, neither the National Education Association nor Dr. seuss enterprises is trying to cancel dr. seuss the remaining six books are also obscure in his canon, and the rest of his beloved classics remain in print, in bookstores and in school libraries. her books will still be taught in schools. he remains the rare author so iconic that his pseudonym is a literal mark.
but the world of children’s literature is in the midst of finding out exactly how central dr. seuss should be for his ecosystem, as our culture reevaluates racist ideas that are very clearly found in his work for adults and possibly in his work for children. And, by extension, it’s in the midst of deciding how it wants to handle the many other pieces of beloved children’s literature that include harmful racial attitudes: books like Laura Ingals Wilder’s Little House series, with its tense treatment of indigenous peoples; the Narnia books, with their deeply uncomfortable Middle Eastern villains; the red-faced fantasies of peter pan.
These books are institutions of children’s literature, books that people dream of presenting to their children. And now the progressive wing of the world of children’s literature is working to find ways to place those books in the landscape of children’s literature that will allow children to appreciate them without being caught off guard by their racism.
is a complex job, not easily reduced to a handful of raucous sound bites from both sides of the political spectrum. But it’s unlikely that while children’s literature faces this dilemma, anyone will be seriously hurt because they can’t find a print copy of Mcelligot’s pool.
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correction: An earlier version of this article said that the cat in the hat stains a house with black ink in the cat in the hat returns. it was actually pink ink.
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