the business that preserves dr. The Seuss Legacy announced Tuesday that six of the celebrated author’s children’s books will cease publication due to racist imagery. The move has sparked a backlash from conservatives who call it another example of “cancel culture” and reignited debate over promoting classic but problematic books.
The announcement came on Read Across America Day, an initiative to promote children’s reading, which coincides with the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel, known as Dr. seuss.
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dr. Seuss Enterprises admitted that the books, published between the 1930s and the late 1970s, “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” the decision may have sparked a renewed focus on the classics, but conversations about racism and prejudice in the author’s books are not new.
“in dr. Seuss, we have a kind of sensibility that is geared toward centering the white child and off-centering everyone else,” said ebony thomas, a professor of children’s and young adult literature at the university of pennsylvania. She is the author of “The Dark Fantastic: The Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games.”
“dr. Seuss was shaped by a completely immersive white supremacist culture,” Thomas said. “Even during that time, our ancestors and elders were protesting racist works and producing alternative histories for our children. How do we decide what lasts and what does not last? it is our responsibility to decide what kind of books to put in front of children.”
The debate is complicated because it must address the strength of classic books while considering the place of such stories in a world of diverse readers.
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a 2019 survey of seuss works found that only 2% of human characters were people of color; 98% were white. representation of and references to black characters relied heavily on anti-blackness and images of white superiority, the study found.
in “and to think i saw him on mulberry street”, a white man is shown holding a whip over a colored man and the elephant he is riding on. In “If I Ran the Zoo,” a white boy holds a large gun as he stands on the heads of three Asian men. “if i run the zoo” also features two men from Africa who have no shirt or shoes and wear grass skirts while holding an exotic animal.
While Seuss’s work has been called “dehumanizing and degrading” to Black, Native American, Jewish and Muslim people, and people of color, according to the survey, he is praised for promoting universal values in children. Then-President Barack Obama praised the author in 2016, saying, “Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values that we all hold dear.”
books that will no longer be published are: “if i ran the zoo”, “and to think i saw it on mulberry street”, “mcelligot’s pool”, “beyond the zebra!”, “ super scrambled eggs”. !”, and “the cat contest.” The company said it made the decision last year after months of discussion, praising the move as “part of our commitment and broader plan to ensure that Dr. Seuss’s catalog enterprises represents and supports all communities and families.”
“I absolutely believe this is a commitment to a better, fairer and more inclusive world of children’s literature,” said Ann Neely, a professor of children’s literature at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “We have so many outstanding children’s books today; there is no need to keep publishing books that are now inappropriate. we must evaluate children’s books according to today’s values, not according to our own nostalgia. children need to see themselves, and others who may be different from them, in an accurate and positive way.”
The Seuss books have come under scrutiny in recent years.
in 2017, a massachusetts school librarian rejected then-first lady melania trump’s seuss books saying they were “steeped in racist propaganda”. That same year, a Seuss Museum in Massachusetts undertook to replace a mural that featured images of “And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” a 2019 book titled “was the cat in the hat black?” argues that “the cat in the hat” was based on anti-black stereotypes and blackface minstrel shows.
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In addition to the beloved books, Seuss also published anti-black and anti-Semitic cartoons in which he depicted black people as monkeys and referred to them by the n-word. Other cartoons featured sexism and racist depictions of Asian people, according to the 2019 analysis. Thus, the National Education Association, which is run throughout the United States, has distanced itself from Seuss in recent years.
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Criticisms of Seuss’s works can be found as far back as the 1980s. Today, parents and teachers alike question the impact his works can have on young, impressionable children. Children begin to form racial prejudices as early as age 3, and those prejudices are resolved by age 7, according to a study. by age 10, the children exhibited adult levels of racial bias, the research found.
“Today’s children are not us. we can’t keep giving our babies the same information we used to have,” thomas said. “Now we know there are anti-Asian stereotypes in ‘and to think I saw it on Mulberry Street.’ ‘The Cat in the Hat’ is Minstrel. When we know better, we can do better.”
neely added: “By today’s standards, several of his books include illustrations that are quite racist. These outdated stereotypes are not appropriate for today’s children.”
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