An illustration shows an Asian man with bright yellow skin, slanted eyes, a ponytail, and a conical hat, holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice over the words “a Chinese who eats with sticks.” another depicts three Asian men in wooden sandals carrying a bamboo cage on their heads with a white boy armed with a gun aloft, along with the rhyme, “I will hunt in the mountains of zomba-ma-tant / with helpers let everyone use their eyes on a slant.”
drawings are from “and to think i saw it on mulberry street” and “if i ran the zoo”, two of the six dr. seuss books that the company in charge of the author’s works announced last week that they will no longer be published due to their racist images, some of which include stereotypical depictions of Asian people.
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Although Seuss’s art has been around for decades (“Mulberry Street,” his first children’s book, was published more than 80 years ago), widespread criticism of his work is relatively recent. Karen Ishizuka, chief curator of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, said Dr. the seuss books have been able to get away with this racism for so long in part due to the persistence of anti-asian racism in the us. uu. since 1800.
“Without a doubt, the long-standing prevalence of racist Asian imagery within the broader general anti-Asian sentiment in the us. uu. added to late reply to dr. Seuss’ racism,” Ishizuka told NBC Asian America. “Generations of Americans have grown up with depictions of Asians that ranged from the grotesque to the comical. especially when muffled in seuss’s rhyming verse, his racist depictions, already normalized in us. uu. society, they are jokingly presented as innocuous.”
dr. seuss finally edited the “mulberry street” image in 1978, more than 40 years after it was first published, removing the yellow pigment from the asian man’s skin, as well as the pigtail, and changing “chinaman” to “chinaman” “. but the character’s slanted eyes remained.
His racism wasn’t limited to children’s books. Dr. Seuss, the pen name for Theodor Seuss Geisel (who died in 1991, at 87), also perpetuated harmful Asian stereotypes in a series of political cartoons. From 1941 to 1943, he published more than 400 cartoons for the New York newspaper “PM,” many of which displayed anti-Japanese racism during World War II.
one of his most infamous political cartoons suggested that japanese americans were a threat to the us. uu. after the bombing of pearl harbor. Titled “Waiting for the Home Sign…”, the cartoon depicts countless characters with the same slanted eyes and glasses, assumed to be Japanese Americans, marching along the West Coast and waiting to pick up tnt from a store labeled “ honorable 5th”. column.” The cartoon was published on Feb. Jan. 13, 1942, just six days before President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent.
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something from dr. Other political cartoons by Seuss during this time use the slur “jap”, depict Japanese people as animals, and include subtitles that replace the letter r with the letter l to make fun of the way Japanese people speak.
Ishizuka is working on developing a new core exhibit for the museum that she hopes will bring greater attention to Dr. Seuss’ political cartoons by featuring original drawings from the library of the University of California, San Diego — including “Waiting for the Signal From Home … ”
“it is important to draw attention to the racist images in dr. seuss’ cartoons and children’s books because they’re almost insidious,” he said. “The damage they cause is harder to identify than when someone calls you ‘jap’ to your face. it’s harder to fight.”
philip nel, children’s literature scholar and professor of english at kansas state university, said another reason why dr. Seuss’s calculation took so long is that people have excused his racism, especially the anti-Japanese propaganda he created during World War II, as a reflection of the times in which he lived. in the black hat? the hidden racism of children’s literature and the need for diverse books, ”he said that this explanation does not hold up.
“The ‘man of his time’ narrative is not much of an argument because making that claim is profoundly ahistorical,” said nel. “All people at all times do not think the same. there were a lot of white Americans during that time who weren’t spreading the rhetoric that he was.”
nel said that the decision of dr. Seuss vowed to stop publishing the books, which in addition to “Mulberry Street” and “If I Run the Zoo,” also include “Mcelligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!”, “Super Scrambled Eggs!” and “the cat’s quizzer” — is due to the longstanding push for book diversity in the us. as well as recent movements for racial and social justice.
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“This is the culmination of decades of work arguing for diverse works and against books that caricature people of color,” Nel said. “The Black Lives Matter movement, I think, has also brought into focus the need for diverse books for young readers. It’s reminded people that one place where justice happens is through representation — acknowledging positive examples and calling out negative ones.”
dr. Seuss’s image as a children’s literary icon has also delayed recognition of his racism. “She is a symbol of American childhood,” said Leslie Ito, a mother of two from Southern California.
In 2017, Ito’s children, Rockett and Zoe, who were 11 and 10 years old at the time, created and distributed flyers in their classrooms on Americawide Reading Day, which was funded by the National Association of education to coincide with dr. seuss birthday: to educate your peers about dr. racist seuss artwork.
“Ever since the kids started elementary school, my husband and I decided it was important for us to teach them about the darker side of dr. Seuss,” Ito said of his children, who are Chinese and Japanese Americans. “We did this every year around World Literacy Day across America, and one year the kids came up with the idea to create a flyer, without anyone asking.”
The kids came home that day telling their parents they got into trouble and had their flyers confiscated, and that night, ito and her husband got an email from the school saying the flyers weren’t appropriate.
In recent years, American Literacy Day has gone out of its way to distance itself from Dr. seuss.
although ito said he understands the hesitation to criticize dr. Seuss, she is proud that her children have contributed to the current recognition of Seuss’s past.
“when I used to google ‘dr. Seuss and Racism,’ our story would first appear for a couple of years, but now it’s completely buried under countless stories,” Ito said. “that excites me because it shows that more people than rockett and zoe care about this topic.”
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