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.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."
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.
What was that about death of the artist? 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.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.
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.
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.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.