On February 2, 2024, someone identifying herself as a Brooklyn mom wrote to the “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s New York Times column, agonizing about an “egregious racial stereotype of a Chinese person” in Dr. Seuss’s And To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street; the writer feared for her eight-month-old son. Should she just leave out the page with the Chinese person? Oh, dear.
I’ve detailed why the image is neither egregious nor a stereotype here.
I have a new stereotype, the “Brooklyn Mom,” namely the kind who sends in such worries to Appiah. The Brooklyn mom is white and so guilty about this that it doesn’t occur to her to Google the history of the supposedly offending image. One of her nightmares: her child will say, “Mommy, that man’s skin looks like chocolate!” in a supermarket within hearing of an African-American person. Brooklyn Mom doesn’t say, “right, that’s ‘cause he’s black” or any reasonable thing; she reddens, tries to hush the kid, and buckles down on checking her privilege. Her worst fear is that the kid will be a racist—the thought makes her swallow an Ativan with her oat milk latte. Another nagging fear: her brother, who is thinking of transitioning, has a beard, recently started going by they/them pronouns, and wore a pink dress to dinner. The five-year-old (even though she’s been to drag queen story hour!) said, “But Uncle Jerry, you can’t be a girl when you have a beard. Do you have a penis? Because girls don’t have them.”
The kid said that! She said that after the Brooklyn Mom read her A Book About Pronouns: What Are Your Words? and Pink is for Boys every bedtime for two weeks. At the kid’s request, too. The Brooklyn mom calls her therapist and sobs.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Beautiful and the Banned: Children's Book Classics to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.