A leading expert on racism in children’s literature has said that the Dr Seuss Foundation’s decision to withdraw six books should be viewed as a “product recall” and not, as many claim, an example of cancel culture.
philip nel, professor of english at kansas state university, is he the author of was the cat in the hat black? the hidden racism of children’s literature and the need for diverse books. He told The Guardian that the six titles by Theodor Geisel, who wrote under the pseudonym Dr Seuss, published between 1937 and 1976, which Dr Seuss Enterprises said he would stop printing, contained stereotypes of a clearly racist nature.
“Dr Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision to choose not to profit from working with racist cartoons and has taken responsibility for the art it is putting out into the world and would support it,” said Nel.
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the titles in question are and to think i saw it on mulberry street, if i run the zoo, mcelligot’s pool, on beyond zebra!, super scrambled eggs! and the cat contest. dr seuss books have sold 700 million copies worldwide.
After this week’s announcement, amid the uproar generated by conservatives in the media and Congress, Dr. seuss quickly dominated the sales charts. On Friday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even shared a video of himself reading green eggs and ham, a perennial strong seller.
“I still like Dr. Seuss so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham,” McCarthy said, inviting viewers to reply “if you still like him too!”
Geisel’s stepdaughter, Lark Gray Dimond-Cates, told the New York Post that “there wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body,” but also said that suspending publication of all six titles was “a wise choice”. But the controversy left many stumped, since the decision was made by Dr Seuss Enterprises and not as a result of the public pressure that has preceded other such decisions.
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nel said the decision to stop publishing titles that include racist cartoons shows only one way to address the problematic material.
“[The books] are not going to disappear,” he said. “They are not being banned. they are not being cancelled. it’s just a decision not to sell them anymore.”
Geisel died in 1991. Later in his life, he made efforts to tone down racial stereotypes in some of his books. Such revisions “were flawed but intentional efforts that softened but did not erase stereotypes,” she said, noting that Geisel also joked about the changes, “which only served to trivialize the significance of the alterations.”
Movements to correct outdated or offensive cultural material take different forms. Turner Classic Movies, for example, has launched Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror, a series dedicated to “problematic” movies. tcm has identified 17 films that will be tackled by five presenters, including Gone with the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Tarzan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Searchers, and Psycho.
“we’re hearing more and more from audiences about moments that really intrigue, if not offend, them in light of all the broader cultural and political conversations we’re having,” the university of chicago film studies professor , Jacqueline. stewart, a reformulated host, told variety.
tcm’s decision to try to contextualize the films but not alter or discard them may reflect the importance of the works and a more mature target audience. nel said that placing controversial work in a larger context and inviting discussion can be risky when the work is aimed at younger consumers.
“Children understand more than they can articulate,” he said. “If you inflict racist images on them before they can express what they are articulating, they can suffer damage that they cannot process.”
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in the case of dr seuss, nel said, that “is itself a reason to remove the books or bring in books or art that counters stereotypes with truth.”
pointed to statistics that show the publishing industry still has a long way to go. According to a recent study on diversity in children’s books, only 22% of children’s books published in 2018 featured non-white characters.
nel pointed out the indian in the lynne reid banks closet series – penguin random house titles on a native american toy figure brought to life, first published in 1980, as an example of a book that remains in print without comment or apology.
“There are many examples of contemporary and older work that the publishing industry should address,” he said, “and there are different ways to do it. there is a debate about what the answer should be, but there should be an answer.”
Simply posing the question of what a child can and cannot see to parents would not be an adequate solution, nel said.
“Parents may not have training in anti-racism education,” he said, “or they may not know how to have these conversations. so, in the case of dr. seuss, is a way of addressing the gap between what one would expect a responsible adult to know and what we might expect a responsible adult to know.
“Either way, children’s book publishing is facing a reckoning, as indeed it has been for some time. This decision, and all the attention it has received, I hope will lead to a broader recognition in the publishing industry: the need for more diverse books and addressing the problems of books being published today.”
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