- 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.
- In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2 percent of the human characters in Seuss' books were people of color. And all of those characters, they say, were "depicted through racist caricatures."
This has nothing to do with the death of the artist. It's about the content of the books, and the effect that that content has on the kids who read them—not about whether Ted Geisel was a good guy or not.
Here's my point:
I am unconvinced that the world benefits from reading hundred year old books.
Sure. "Classics." But there are lots of books, there are lots of good books, and if we're only going to be able to force these poor fucks to read for twelve years at which point they're lost forever why the hell can't we make them read Judy Blume instead of Charlotte Bronte?
I had a love of literature systematically driven out of me by books that had to be "contextualized" in order to make some fuckin' PTA group happy somewhere - every kid who has to stop down for a day to discuss the n-word in Huck Finn is losing out on a day of Huck Finn. But we aren't even talking about Huck Finn. We're talking about Dr. Seuss.
There are waaaaay better books out there than Dr. Seuss. We can let him go. Really, we can.
I wish I could share this a million time over. There different morals back then. (Pardon my language here in a bit). In 2009 it was perfectly fine to call someone a fag or gay, but thankfully now that has changed. It was the same then with plenty of other words that aren't acceptable and stereotypes that were terrible. That was the norm though and it was a part of that culture.
- Dr. Seuss also grew up six human generations ago. Back when gay people were legally not-people and killed. Back when interracial marriage was illegal. Back when a black man could be lynched on the suspicion he was out of line. Back when the most distrusted group in the non-south were Catholics. Back when there was no food safety, no environmental protections, rampant poverty, and no public education.
What was that about death of the artist?
- we encourage discussions on how we have moved forward and no longer murder people left and right for being with the people they love. How justice should be as an ideal to strive for. How racist caricatures lead to wars where millions of people died. We learn from the past, get better, move forward or we kill our society. And part of that learning is reading the classics and seeing how far we have come and how far we still need to go.
These are CHILDREN'S BOOKS. Ain't nobody talking about the dangers of racist caricatures when they read "If I Ran the Zoo" with their 2nd graders. High school English class, reading Huck Finn, R&J, and Moby Dick? Absolutely. Have those discussions. Problematize the texts. But recognize that a 7 year old probably isn't ready to deconstruct this.
- I like the stories that Rudyard Kipling produced, but man is some of that stuff seriously dated, racist by today's standards and out of line with modern sensibilities. He writing gives us a way to travel back in time and understand that era.
I agreed with you wholesale until I read Said. Said's entire point is that Kipling gives you a way to travel back in time and repeat the exact same mistakes of that era. More than that, the canon of works in which white writers encounter foreign cultures is not useful in understanding the white writers, it's useful in perpetuating their prejudices and distaste for foreign cultures.
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.
The Seuss family got a crazy friend of mine tossed in jail after they allegedly stole a story of his which he entered into a contest they sponsored. I have no idea what the ultimate truth of the alleged theft was.
The Seuss family had enough pull to send two local police detectives up from Cali to get my buddy arrested for a vaugley theatening email.
It was a crazy mess.
Fuck the Seuss estate, they are pricks.
Wow. That’s some crazy shit. The title of his play just made me laugh out loud in a restaurant.
- Angry at this turn of events, Steen wrote a play — The Tragical History of Audrey Geisel or How the Grinch Plagiarized My Goddamn Children's Story —
Hahahaha!
I found a video of Charles talking about the case.
He dressed like this about 80% of the time.
It in no way imparts how what a strange man he was.
He slept in a little attic room of our house for about a month while he was going through the Seuss law suit, I can't believe that my roommates didn't kill me for letting him in the front door.
His grandfather was known as The Uranium King! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Steen
Wow, again. I watched the video. He is quite a character. You must have had patient roommates.
More impressive though is the story of the Uranium King. That’s a hell of a story:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Steen
Never bet the farm on Arabian horse breeding. That sounds like such a “new money,” thing to do. Lol.
Craziness. You never know where a post about teaching Dr. Seuss to kids will take you....
Thanks for the worm hole. I enjoyed it.
Kinda reminds me of
Instead, What do we do with art of Us versus Them with the connotation of 'What do we pass down to our children?'
More a matter of what the kids do with the information of 'these people look/dress/act different' and how their mentors guide them therein... presenting other books, views and qualified, succinct history with blended classrooms should do the trick given no predispositions on the kids' part.