A couple of weeks ago, Cambridge public school librarian LIZ PHIPPS SOEIRO wrote an open letter to First Lady Melania Trump in which she rejected the donation of ten Dr. Seuss books. Soeiro’s letter turned out to be politically (and possibly professionally) counterproductive; nonetheless, it made a few good points: 1) Mrs. Trump is donating books to school based, not on need, but on test scores, 2) Representing diverse perspectives in children’s books is a good thing, and 3) Children of the 21st century don’t need the children’s books my generation did. Excluding Dr. Seuss from the canon of children’s literature might have drawn a few sighs and shakes of the head from the general public. But accusing the creator of the Sneetches, Yooks, Zooks, and Who’s, not to mention Gerald McBoing-Boing and Bartholomew Oobleck, of racism? It’s not surprising that Soeiro’s letter drew charges of political correctness.
More recently, three children’s book writers “declined to take part in the Springfield Children’s Literature Festival at The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum because a mural there featured a ‘jarring racial stereotype.'” The stereotype in question: an illustration of a happy-looking Chinese man with chopsticks and a bowl of rice.
Merriam-Webster, another Springfield, MA institution, defines a stereotype as “a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment.”
As a middle-aged, white guy, I may not have the best vantage point for judging offensiveness, but I don’t think this picture meets the definitional requirements of a stereotype. This illustration may have represented an “oversimplified opinion” of the Chinese when it was drawn in 1950, but it’s hardly the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Chinese people today. Where’s the prejudice or uncritical judgment? Historically, the illustration may have presented an oversimplification of a people, but in the 21st century? The character might as well be a Sneetch. How can it be harmful?
“A jarring racial stereotype”
Stereotypes are indeed harmful. At the very least, racial slurs and stereotypes provide a vocabulary for racists to characterize their targets. Is that what this illustration does?
In her letter, Soeiro insists that
Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art.
Are Dr. Seuss’s books saturated with racism? His use of racial stereotypes is no secret. Several years ago, I attended a lecture that included a viewing of his World War II era cartoons. The stereotypes of Japanese characters were indeed disturbing–buck teeth, slant eyes, and Coke bottle bottom glasses. I also came across some grossly racist characterizations of Africans when researching for this post. Needless to say, none of these illustrations appear in Dr. Seuss’s books.
Given the word limits of an open letter, Soeiro’s doesn’t provide an exegesis of “racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes” in If I Ran a Zoo (1950) and And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937). She does, however, provide hyperlinks, which ultimately lead to two sources: 1) a report issued to the National Educator’s Association, Rethinking Dr. Seuss for NEA’s Read Across America Day, and 2) children’s literature scholar Philip Nel.
Nel has compellingly argued that that racial stereotypes of black people were the source for The Cat in the Hat. Dr. Seuss seems to have based the Cat in the Hat’s smile on a black woman who operated the elevator for a building he worked in. The hat and gloves evidently recall minstrel shows, one of which Dr Seuss appeared in as an adolescent Theodore Geisel. These connections are both academically and biographically interesting. From a scholarly point of view, the racial origins of The Cat in the Hat complicate and deepen our understanding of a major children’s book writer. But how could the racial origins of the The Cat in the Hat have a negative effect on readers today, particularly children?
Minstrelsy and blackface have been an area of academic interest to scholars studying American culture and literature for over 25 years. How many people under the age of 70 know anything about minstrelsy? And of those people who might be familiar with, say, Amos and Andy, how many could recognize the tradition they emerged from as minstrel shows? The Cat in the Hat may have, in Nel’s words, been black. Academically, that’s interesting. But it doesn’t mean readers today, particularly children, will somehow imbibe the racial predilections of Dr. Seuss.
Katie Ishizuka-Stephens, author of Rethinking Dr. Seuss for NEA’s Read Across America Day, and at least an indirect source for Soeiro, believes The Cat in the Hat is as surreptitious and insidious as commies in the 1950s or witches in the 1690s. Their messages sneak into and corrupt the minds of the innocent:
“‘racialized origins [of The Cat in the Hat] flows stealthily into children’s culture [where] the argument appears racially innocent. This appearance of innocence provides a cover under which otherwise discredited racial ideology survives and continues, covertly, to influence culture’” (Nel, 2017). When a Black person or “minstrel” is drawn as a “Cat”, or the color of “ink” is switched from black to “pink”, it disguises the racialized symbols. However, the racialized (and racist) references are there, and they are significant. The “Cat” may ostensibly be a cat, but he looks like, acts like, and is treated like, a minstrel (or dehumanized Black man). The Cat was appropriated from the image of a Black woman, enacts anti-Black references from American culture, and was created from the imagination of a man who performed in his own minstrel shows in blackface.
This is liberal wingnuttery of Biblical proportions. And I mean Biblical. In the real world, meaning comes from the interaction of the reader with the text. A text must be interpreted to be understood. In Ishizuka-Stephens’s world, the meaning of a text transcends history. This is not much different from the Christian fundamentalist belief that God’s eternal word lives in the Bible where it is self-evident and requires no interpretation. Readers who know nothing of minstrel shows or Dr. Seuss’s elevator operator will not be corrupted by racist stereotypes. If the power of stereotypes remained in the drawings, then 19th century caricatures of the Irish would still have the ability to offend. There’s something scholastic, philosophically speaking, and fundamentalist, textually speaking, about hunting historical stereotypes in children’s books. At best, it’s irrelevant, at worst, counterproductive.
Rarely a day goes by that the news doesn’t report on a public official getting sanctioned or fired for racist commentary on social media. Those comments offend because they are based on active racial stereotypes. Political correctness is largely a conservative concept meant to silence liberal points of view and make room for racist and sexist insensitivity, but the witch hunt for racially pure children’s books provides aid and comfort to those who continue to do real damage.
In the course of my substitute teaching I was in an elementary school library the other day. I flipped through their copy of To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, specifically to look for the offending image. There is exactly one questionable image toward the end where the Chinese person’s face is colored in bold yellow. For context though it should be pointed out that the book depicts Caucasians as snow white which isn’t any more realistic. I think its a representation that while maybe insensitive by modern standards was probably not done with sinister intent. Dr. Seuss illustrations are essentially cartoons and cartoons exaggerate physical traits all the time. I think this is an example of adults overthinking something targeted to children which will probably go right over the heads of most children. BTW, I think Dr. Seuss is just fine for the current generation. They are well-written for beginning readers and the schools I sub in still celebrate his birthday every year.
Most of me wants to defer to the professional educators about all this, especially here at BMG. I don’t have a position on the specific question, I see valid concerns on all sides (and there are more than two).
I want to add a few things:
First, my late mother spent her career in the Montgomery County MD public library system. She started as a children’s librarian, and when she retired held the most senior non-political position possible in the library administration. This is not a new issue, and this is not the first time that Dr. Seuss has been the focus of a such discussion. My mother’s posture was always something to the effect that the public library is a resource, not a censor. She often said, privately, that if the county removed every title or author that every parent found objectionable, there would be no books left.
The policy that my mother attempted to follow was that a parent is always the ultimate decider of what their child should read. Her view of the children’s section was that it was a place where parents could comfortably allow children to browse — always with the proviso that a parent should review the child’s selections before checking them out.
A title that provoked a similar controversy in the 1970s is Little Black Sambo — with more justification, in my eyes.
I think there is little justification for an argument that Dr. Seuss should be removed from library shelves, just as my mother resisted the effort to remove LBS from the Montgomery County MD public library systems.
A more powerful counter-argument is ironically being made simultaneously in Mississippi (why am I not surprised), where a school district is removing “To Kill a Mockingbird from a junior high school reading list.
The next thing I want to add is that children have many more choices today than they did when the Dr. Seuss books were published. My five children, born between 1983 and 1996, were all avid readers and all loved to be read to. None of them particularly liked Dr. Seuss. We have several titles, including an anthology, in our home library. My children only rarely asked for it to be read to them or pulled it for their own use.
Finally, my sense is that this kerfuffle (I love that word) has become focused on negativity towards Dr. Seuss, and in my view distorts what Ms. Soeiro actually wrote. Ms. Soeiro made two key observations:
1. Other schools need books more than Cambridge. Beyond the undue emphasis on test scores, school libraries are being shuttered across America — a tragedy that is exacerbated by the policies of the current administration.
2. Other much better titles exist for school children.
Each of these two observations is devastating and accurate.
I fear that the national media kerfuffle about Ms. Trump’s action serves to blunt or even silence these accurate and devastating observations. Red America would FAR rather argue about Dr. Seuss than address what our Red government is doing to our children.
I fear that by keeping the focus of this diary on Dr. Seuss, we unintentionally contribute to that distortion.
The issue here BMG, in my view, is what Donald Trump and the GOP is doing to America’s schools and school children, and what role Melania Trump plays in that.
The ten books sent by FLOTUS’ office skipped titles that might be considered liberal like The Sneetches and the Bitter Butter Battle.
Soeiro had some good points, but they were lost by introducing the “racism” of Dr. Seuss’s books and her arrogant, consdescending tone. It was a self-inflicted wound to her argument.
@ arrogant, condescinding: Maybe.
Ms. Soeiro is a librarian, not a politician. In my view, her two key points are unassailable.
Our entire public discourse is now dominated by the “arrogant and condescending tone” of the GOP. It’s been that way at least since Barack Obama was elected in 2008.
Barack Obama steadfastly refused to admit the flagrant racism of his GOP opposition for most of his administration. He made it clear to his confidants that he never wanted to sound like an angry black man. He very successfully avoided that self-inflicted wound. The racism of his opposition was seldom challenged (except in arrogant and condescending circles).
I think we need to tolerate imperfections in the commentary of mere mortals who have good points to make.
Yesterday, I heard Elizabeth Warren correctly remind us that the whole Trump-vs-kneeling thing is a distraction intended to keep the true horrors of what he and his ilk is doing to us off the media radar.
I think this is the same thing. I’m not disputing that the tone of the letter from Ms. Soeiro was perhaps more arrogant and condescending than it might have been.
Still, in my view we have all lost when we allow that to obscure the far more important message that her letter very successfully conveyed.
I think you give Soeiro less credit than she deserves. She’s a quite capable writer. This isn’t the first thing she’s published either. She published the letter in Horn Book, the premier publication for children’s literature. (Evidently, she didn’t have the authority to reject Mrs. Trump’s donation either, which didn’t prevent her from claiming she did).
As a liberal, I don’t believe we should pull our punches, but we should need to be clear about her audience. Soeiro’s point was lost because she included contentions that were easily, if not necessarily fairly, ridiculed. If we’re going to talk about cultural diversity we can’t provide details that allow the general public to easily dismiss it.
I’m a liberal. I read her letter, the first time. I think her objections are sound and her points accurate.
My bottom line is that I think the objections being raised are a convenient rationalization.
I’m reminded of mainstream America’s reaction to Jeremiah Wright.
In my view, the “general public” and mainstream media will find or manufacture an excuse to discredit pretty much anyone who dares reveal the depths of racism in our society.
This isn’t about Dr. Seuss, nor is it about whether or not Ms. Soeiro’s authority, nor is about her chops as a writer.
Ms. Soeiro challenged Ms. Trump, the administration of her husband, and the entire GOP. As a liberal, I think my obligation is to defend the accuracy of her objections, rather than join in an attack on her weaknesses.
And it backfired.
I had actually written this a week or so ago and thought it was lost. Given Petr’s post, I reworked it to put my agreement with him where my mouth was.
Defend Soeiro all you want. I actually tried to keep my criticism of her letter toned down in my post.
What I truly object to, besides the arrogance and counterproductivity, is the weird sort of liberal Puritanism that seeks to expunge the Cat in the Hat for it’s racial origins. Soeiro only alludes to it, the Report I link to is really objectionable.
As you say, Ms. Soeiro only alluded to the objections to these books. I appreciate your evenhandedness, I’m not trying to attack you.
We may have to simply agree to disagree. A great many people were offended by Jeremiah Wright, enough that Mr. Obama was forced to disavow him. I was, frankly, disappointed that Mr. Obama was forced to choose between his long-standing relationship with Mr. Wright and his desire to be President.
I understand Mr. Obama’s choice, and I understand (at least intellectually) the opposition to Mr. Wright’s sermons. Still, at the end of the day, I think that episode foreshadowed America’s reaction to Barack Obama’s race.
America was ready for Barack Obama to be President. America was NOT ready for a black man to be President.
I see a similar dynamic here. I understand your objections to the letter from Ms. Soeiro. I think I even understand your objections to “the weird sort of liberal Puritanism that seeks to expunge the Cat in the Hat for it’s racial origins”. A great many people, including my mother, reacted precisely the same way to “Little Black Sambo”.
I guess that I just don’t see it as all that weird.
I’m also reminded of the boiling controversy in the Episcopal Church when the 1929 prayer book was being replaced. That new book went to great lengths to use gender-neutral language when referring to God. A great many people (including yours truly) said that such changes were “weird”, “unnecessary”, and reflected an over-the-top sensitivity about male-dominated language.
I see know that I was wrong about that language. It DOES matter. Saying “It is right give God thanks and praise” IS more inclusive than “It is right give Him thanks and praise”.
I like your commentary, I appreciate your perspective. I’m at a different place from you about this issue.
“I see now” (I started with “I now know” and tried to change my mind mid-comment).
Tangent, but I am excited to hear a 1929 Prayer Book service at the 150th anniversary service for Church of our Savior! Admittedly the liturgy is one area where I’d prefer traditional language, but like you, I recognize my privilege and that my tastes might marginalize others.
It’s a hard perspective to develop, but one that I’ve found easier to do the older I get and one my faith helps reinforce.
I don’t particularly think Dr Seuss was a racist, but even if he was what good does it do to suppress that fact?
I certainly think he was part and parcel of a racist era in our country. The distinction, if any is to be made, I guess, is between perpetuation, in which we all complicit, and perpetration, which is individual. I think the actual erection of a monument to Gen Robert E. Lee, or Nathan Bedford Forest, decades after their death, and mostly for the shock value, is outrightly and deliberately perpetrating a racist act. I think drawings for children that were widely acceptable, and widely accepted, might perpetuate racism, but that leaves it open to the notion that it was unconsciously done… and, if so, we’re all indicted for that, and there’s no reason to single out Dr Seuss.
I made a similar point recently about Tom Yawkey. Was he a racist? Maybe. But would he have acted any differently if he wasn’t? To be utterly frank, he was a businessman in a racist town and he may not have wanted to rock that particular boat, especially since it was making him a lot of money. Maybe he knew the Red Sox fans and was just giving them what they wanted? (I was told in the mid-70’s, rather angrily, that ‘girls don’t go to ball games!’ when I suggested they might,.. and if that doesn’t give you an indication of the fans attitude, I don’t what will… )
The other, interesting, question is that of ‘minstrelsy’ which was an entirely above board practice that actually predates the founding of the Union. originating in Medieval Europe and only lately to be associated with blackface and cultural stereotypes. This, too, is particularlizing. So much so, that we’ve had to invent an entirely new name, ‘buskers,’ to describe the modern day practice of minstrelsy.
I took my kids to the Dr. Seuss museum this year on the day of our annual Big E pilgrimage. I saw the Mulberry Street mural, on the ground floor as you come in, just to the left of the stairs right in front of the front door. I was a bit startled by the Chinese man on the mural. It just felt awkward — out of date in a somewhat inappropriate way. Then, I read that while the rest of the mural is apparently a careful reproduction of the Mulberry Street illustrations, the Chinese man is not — on the wall, his skin is white (like all other people in the mural); in the book, it’s yellow (unlike the Anglo folks in the pages).
And so I wonder: was it a mistake or a decision to change Dr. Seuss’ illustration in this specific way at the museum? What’s the story with that decision, if that’s what it was? It seems to me that this story might shed light on the racism, real or imagined, associated with the image.
I thought the museum was boring. I’m not an expert on museum curation, but I didn’t think it was very interesting.
I don’t know if the yellow was removed for the drawing. Christopher had a copy of the book.
It seems like the museum is going to use the illustration as a teachable moment, which makes a lot of sense, which is probably the most appropriate response to the situation. (The Mayor of Springfield’s response was to invite President Trump to the city).
Regarding the response of the Mayor of Springfield, I am frankly more interested in whether or not Conrad Larviere is still on the street.
What is happening to school libraries in Springfield? Has Mr. Sarno spoken publicly about the effect of the policies promulgated by Ms. Devos? Are the titles on Ms. Soeiro list available to children in the libraries of the Springfield public school system?
I’d like us to keep our focus on things that matter.
I think we should agree they are racist stereotypes by today’s standards, and the image should be removed from the mural and similar images should be removed from his books or updated for the present time. I believe Geisel himself regretted the anti-Japanese propaganda posters in his own lifetime and he was a longtime critic of anti-Jewish and anti-black racism. He personally edited the Mulberry Street image to be more palatable to a 1970’s audience. I would say a 2017 audience would still reject the modified version as stereotypical Orientalist imagery and it should be updated again to take into account evolving notions of what is and isn’t racist imagery.
Like Mark Twain, Dr. Seuss is not a racist, but he did use language and imagery that would rightly be considered racist in the present era. It would be presentist to call them racists for this reason, but it would also be naive to assume children understand this historical contextualization. I do think children’s books can and should be censored or modified with the times to remove racist imagery, since this is the age where racial stereotypes have an indelible impact. Herge revised Tintin, and it’s been revised again. I see no reason why Dr. Seuss is any different.
As for the broader point about resisting Trump, she can send those books across the river to Boston where they are sorely needed. I also welcome the good citizens of the Peoples Republik to make a property tax donation if they want to to level the playing field between our per pupil averages. I think the Charles will be fully swimmable before such altruism occurs.
I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with editing previously published work to conform to modern mores. For something like Dr. Seuss the target audience (children) isn’t going to pick up on it anyway, and older audiences for other works such as Mark Twain should be able to understand context. I heard the story of Little Black Sambo when I was young. It did not make me racist because it was, you know, a STORY, one I don’t even remember well enough now to tell you what specifically was objectionable without looking back. I read Mulberry Street when I was a more appropriate age for it to, and did not even recall the imagery without looking back. This is much ado about nothing.
Well Dr. Seuss and Herge would disagree with you, since they edited their work in their lifetimes to reflect modern racial mores. The Hardy Boys series has done this too. My first edition copy of The Secret of the Cliffs had far more anti-semitic, racist, and orientalist imagery in it than the 1950’s version my dad had or the modern versions you can see at the library.
This isn’t literature like Twain or Shakespeare where the original text is key to the contextualization of the work, but incidental depictions unrelated to the thrust of the book that can be updated or modified for the times. As the original illustrators already did.
If the original authors want to edit their own work that is their prerogative, but the rest of us should not presume to do it for them. That is disrespectful IMO.
I think it depends on the context and the audience. I think teaching about Twains use of the “n-word” is essential to the context and the audience would be middle and high schoolers capable by that point of discerning the context and having a real discussion about it. Teaching the controversy is part of understanding the work, which is why I reject not having the conversation as some schools do or banning the work entirely as others do.
I’ve read versions of the Hardy Boys lying around my household from three different eras. My grandfathers (20s) my fathers (50s) and my brothers (80s) and they all reflect the mores and prejudices of their times. The 50s one cut out the use of Jewish villains entirely and changed the n word to the then acceptable “colored” to describe black characters. It still had a pretty stereotypical Chinese villain but he went from being Fu Manchu esque to Mao esque since they connected the smuggling to communism. The 80s one really emphasized money and technology and had actual diverse friends for the boys, but the women still seemed fairly one dimensional trophies for the boys to acquire.
So if the work isn’t canonical literature like Twain, but conventional children’s literature designed to model good citizenry and encourage literacy than I would be comfortable with the publisher modifying it to encourage progressive depictions of race, gender, oritenstion and identity. The vulnerabilities of children that age are real, and I think we have to balance helping them achieve residency since the world isn’t a bubble with far more support than we may have needed ourselves in the past.
I guess I just disagree, both about whether someone other than the author should revise and whether children are really going to pick up on those things adults seems to overthink.
The whole Kerfuffle can be explained if you google “liz soeiro dressed as cat in the hat”. She dressed as the cat in the hat and celebrated Dr Suess a year ago, now she takes a cheap shot at Melania. We are broken as a country and both sides liberal/conservative are culpable.
This right-wing meme (promoted by Fox News) illustrates how little content there is in the “Dr. Seuss” aspect of this kerfuffle. I know this may be hard to comprehend, but scholars ARE able to occasionally enjoy authors and books while still making harsh criticisms of those same authors and books.
I appreciate fine food. I know full well that deep-fried onion rings from “Bill and Bob’s Roast Beef” in Salem are unhealthy, filled with fat, and are anything but fine food. If a celebrity made a high-profile offering of gift certificates to help feed needy children and included a certificate for Bill and Bob’s onion rings (perhaps mixed in with McDonald’s QPs and Hostess Twinkees for dessert), I could well imagine making a public response highly critical the offering and of the item. The fact that I occasionally enjoy those rings is irrelevant to the point of the criticism.
My takeaway from this is that Ms. Soeiro hit a nerve.
She took no “cheap shot” at Melania Trump. She correctly called out Ms. Trump for hypocrisy for sending books to schools that don’t need them while the GOP is slashing funding for schools that do, and she provided a list of far better children’s titles for ANY such gift. Neither is a “cheap shot” — my view is that Ms. Soeiro made a perfectly legitimate personal response to an empty and hypocritical gesture of a woman whose husband is leading the charge to do great harm to children — especially minority children — across America.
I don’t doubt that Fox News jumped at the chance to vilify Ms. Soeiro. What disappoints me is that so many liberal and left-leaning commentators join the attack in what is to me a misguided attempt at “balance”.
We certainly are broken as country. I completely and categorically reject your assertion that “both sides liberal/conservative are culpable”.
Scott, of course, is wrong.
Soeiro’s wearing a Cat in the Hat costume raises questions, but it doesn’t invalidate the points she makes. Logically, his contention is called tu quoque that intends to discredit the opponent’s argument by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s). If I were to speculate, I would say that Soeiro attended some professional development or read something and learned about the Seuss/racism issue and that she wouldn’t dress up now. People learn. Consistency is the hobgoblin of conservative minds.
Soeiro didn’t hit a nerve. No one has to hit a nerve to get the Right excited. They are on lookout 24/7 for thing to disapprove of and attack. Instead, she hung up a pinata and invited the wingnuts to the party.
I don’t think this quote is substantiated by me. I haven’t seen any false equivalence on this issue, but I haven’t read much commentary either. The people I have talked to shake their heads, and they are, in fact, liberals.
Not sure what’s racist about The Cat in the Hat and I see no problem dressing up as such. Just because one book is suspect doesn’t mean they all have to be painted with the same brush.
I’m with you that the evidence that the Cat in the Hat is racist is not sufficiently damning to me, but I respect her right to make a different choice based on her research. I would argue that even if the image did have racist origins-and it’s unclear from her evidence that it did-that the image was never received as a racist image and has been embraces as a non-racial image by American pop culture. But not my classroom, so not my decision.
Geisel himself once acknowledged that the white gloves and impish “secret” grin of the Cat derived from an elevator operator who was a black woman. I don’t think that makes it explicitly racist. I think what racism is found in it (if any) derives from some combination of Geisel’s representation of the world he lived in, his very specific artistic styling and the piercing gaze of the the person searching it.
It’s hard to see it now, from this remove, but the work of Dr. Seuss pretty much introduced the ‘grotesque’ to the mainstream (not grotesque as in ‘eww, yuck’ but rather as a deliberate form of art exaggerating and distorting features, apart from considerations of beauty…. which has been of the art world since Hieronymus Bosch and through to people like Picasso and Dali) This is not limited to his art either, but in his writing or, to pay a real compliment to him, in his lyrics, wherein the form and substance of the language is smooshed, folded, elongated and returns as such things like ‘Sneetches’ and Oobleck.’
If you contrast some of the childrens books that Geisel created the Cat in the Hat to oppose, in specific the old ‘Dick and Jane’ primers that were soporifically bland writing with drawings that were tidy and technically correct but aesthetically empty, you’ll notice the difference. The Dick and Jane primers were attempts to simultaneously be inoffensive (i.e. mainstream) and condescending to children. If you’re not familiar with either Dick and Jane primers or the Cat in the Hat, you may reference the difference between Loony Tunes cartoons and SpongeBob, more recent examples, to see a difference (although I’m not comparing the quality of Loony Tunes to that of Dick and Jane….)
I think, but really have nothing besides intuition to go on, it is his style, in both art and writing and the grotesquerie therein, to which people are making reference in order to see racism. Long ago, people put on blackface and made exaggerated bug-eyed ‘dats’ and ‘deres’ in what truly was grotesque mockery of blacks in service to a cultural hegemonic orthodoxy. And the Cat in the Hat, the character, looks like that…. but everything else in the book is exaggerated in similar manner. The Cat is not a sore-thumb grotesquerie starkly contrasted against otherwise straightforward drawings but of a piece in a whole, all of which is done up in a similar style.
I have to confess that I’m starting to come around to agree with Mark’s criticism of Ms. Soeiro.
It really troubles me that the thread (now with more than 20 comments) is dominated by an extended discussion of whether or not the corpus of Dr. Seuss in general and “The Cat in the Hat” in particular was racist.
I would MUCH rather see us talking about:
– The hypocrisy of the “gift”
– The TERRIBLE things being done to public schools and public libraries by this administration
– What we can do to change this
I met Elizabeth Warren at a fund-raiser in JP last weekend. She talked about this specific media strategy of Mr. Trump and his GOP collaborators.
The strategy is to fill the media (and by implication, social media like BMG) with the “NFL kneeling” controversy, or the latest outrageous tweets, or even (perish the thought) war with North Korea or Iran, so that the media and social media do NOT talk about:
– What this GOP government is doing to working class people, poor people, and especially minorities and women.
– What this GOP government is doing to health care, especially for working class families and poor families
– The tax cuts and subsidies this GOP government is giving to the already-wealthy
– What this GOP government is doing to public education
– What this GOP government is doing to science
– What this GOP government is doing to the environment
– What this GOP government is doing to transportation
etc., etc., etc.
NOBODY CARES about Dr. Seuss. It is a distraction.
What has the Democratic Party done for working class people in the past four decades? The party is also guilty of distracting the working class, blaming their plight on “the global economy”, their lack of education, and poor skills…..despite the fact that in other developed nations, the working class is less educated, works fewer hours, receives more benefits, and has a wage that is not dwarfed by the gargantuan salaries of the CEO’s and board members that help to fund BOTH parties?
More Democratic party bashing from JTM.
You could list what the party has done for the working class in the past 40 years….or you could attack me. Ad hominem is a strategy that Trump employs about as much as you.
Or I can ignore your trolling, since:
1. Your question has been asked an answered here a BAZILLION times, and you reject each answer each time.
2. The effect of answering would to fill the thread with yet another bullshit exchange between the two of us.
BTW, “ad hominem” does not mean “somebody who criticizes you”.
An actual ad hominem attack on you would be if I wrote, for example, “None of JTM’s comment can possibly be true because JTM wrote it”. That’s not what I wrote.
I’m not interested in giving you more opportunities to bash the Democratic party and to lie about me.
More Trumpesque behavior on your part…..Clintonesque as well, I might add. Deny, attack, then call it “old news”. We’ve seen it all before.
In another thread, a BMG member attacks Democrats (Walsh and DeLeo) but you remain silent.
But keep up the ad hominem attacks…they expose you for who you are.
Tom has had quite a bit to say about DeLeo, but how did we get off on such a tangent?
It’s how it works. I dare to challenge neoliberal Democrats in defense of working class Americans and Tom goes off on one of his classic rants…”Women! Minorities! GLBT! ” all in effort to distract us from the reality that in four decades, the Democrats have failed to support real wage growth for the working class, instead, remaining loyal to the .1% because as he puts it, “the money has to come from somewhere”
It classic “Third Way” politics ala Clinton and Tony Blair, both of whom sold the working class down the river in order to feather their own beds and rework the Democrats into the party of wealthy professionals with liberal social views and conservative economic views.
What in blazes are you prattling on about? We are trying to talk about Ms. Soeiro and her open letter.
As Mark humorously said, you seem to be in the wrong room. Or even on the wrong blog.
I think you’re in the wrong room. This is The Cat the Hat Racist room. The room for the Democratic Party Has Done Nothing for the Working is down the hall..
I came here for an argument, not getting hit on the head…
That’s not an argument. It’s a contradiction! A contradiction is not an argument. Yes it is! No it isn’t!
The concepts of both hegemony and orthodoxy are as old as the hills, and our peculiarly American forms of racism and sexism are most powerful in that space where male hegemony and white orthodoxy meet. Political correctness is indeed a conservative concept, but one which exploits the discomfort ( to make more virulent the power of the -isms) that arises when a nascent orthodoxy, which may be more enlightened than the previous, is at odds with the hegemony. Lacking insight to evaluate the emerging orthodoxy (or, indeed, perhaps an emerging lack of orthodoxy) they fear, simple-mindedly, that the oppression they visited upon others, will be visited upon them. And they are alright with this. What they accuse others of doing, in situations like this, is what they would do if they found themselves in the situation… so fair is fair, by their lights. Meh. I say.
To be perfectly blunt, a lot of conservatives are stupid. And the ones who aren’t stupid, either prize their anger over their own intelligence or are amoral enough to use the anger and the stupid (or try to) for their own ends. This toxic melange of malice, madness and insipidity have turned what was once an essentially earnest politick into an intellectually shallow, and ethically fallow, bellowing that is mere defense of their own hegemony. Anything that doesn’t reflect their hegemony, but is powerful enough to appear as orthodoxy, must be opposed and, as you point out, silenced… even if it is something they once professed themselves… perhaps exactly because it was something they once professed themselves.
One of the aspects here to which (I think) Mark might be objecting (and something to which I certainly object) is the desire, on the left, to punish, Mrs Trump in the particular and racists in the general case. Quite apart from being a morally suspect approach all on its own, this can affect a feeling of persecution on the part of those same simple-minded conservatives…. Not entirely, but near as no never mind, engaging with their prophecy only to fulfill it. It’s not enough, apparently, to use the occasion of Mrs Trumps gifts to engender a dialogue, but the gifts must be pointedly refused and the giver scolded. Not content, and in order to unimpeachably justify that scolding, the sins must be magnified and, strangely enough, more power than they might actually possess is attributed. To that, also, I say…. Meh.
Did I say a lot of conservatives were stupid? Yes. A lot of liberals are, too…