But some of Seuss' classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of color. In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes. In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless and wearing grass skirts as they carry an exotic animal. Outside of his books, the author's personal legacy has come into question, too — Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in college and performed as the main character in full blackface.


kleinbl00:

At first, I wondered what the difficulty was in teaching that previous generations had different (I'd go as far as inferior) values and that progress is the act of being better humans than those that came before you. But then I remembered the John Gardner point that we teach the books that are easy to teach, not the books that are good and adding in a "and here's why we don't want you absorbing these values" layer on Dr. Seuss readers is an awful lot of overhead to saddle a first grader with.

But it's simpler than that.

What's the fundamental value of Dr. Seuss? Sure, they're colorful. They're fun. But they aren't particularly clever; much of Seuss' rhymes work because he makes up words. The meter is often tortuous. Dr. Seuss is largely good compared to what came before him; you only need to be saddled with one of those wretched Beatrix Potter Costco collections by a great uncle or grandparent to recognize that children's books used to be dreadful and then they just kinda sucked.

If you look at Dr. Seuss' bibliography you see a whole bunch of books that coincided with the childhood and parenthood of 'boomers. '37 to '71 is pretty much the Greatest Hits of Dr. Seuss, from Mulberry Street to The Lorax. And there's stuff in there to learn - we did The Butter Battle Book in AP History as an example of pop culture and the Cold War 'cuz it took less time to digest than The Day After but we're not talking about that we're talking about stuff we're exposing young readers to.

Seuss is better than Madeline but not much better than The Snowy Day which has the advantage of being entirely about an African-American kid. My kid can find examples of her race doing dandy everywhere she looks; we're in charge. Her friend the African-American transsexual girl with the white lesbian foster mother? She's gonna need every positive reinforcement she can get and statistically speaking, society benefits the more confident and comfortable she is. Neither Crazy Rich Asians nor Straight Outta Compton are great films but they are full of minorities acting like humans instead of cardboard cutouts filling a square in Minority Bingo so they're loved.

There's lots of great books out there about kids and people that are colors other than white. There's even more in which people in colors other than white aren't negative stereotypes. I fully encourage any curriculum that reaches beyond "that which makes 'boomers happy" in order to present examples of minorities being non-minor. The future ain't white and the more we cling to a white past the more people we're leaving in the dark.


posted 1875 days ago