Bring Back Banned Dr. Seuss Books

Because they're not racist

In March, 2021, six Dr. Seuss titles were cancelled, deemed “racist” because of drawings the publisher, Random House, cited as “egregious racial and ethnic stereotypes” which they consider “ hurtful and wrong.” The following will no longer be published: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. 

All this made me wonder how we’re defining stereotypes as opposed to caricatures, including self-portraits, and folk art. Random House seems to be lumping all of the above into “offensive images,” and by “offensive” they seem to mean any silly image or text about a non-white ethnicity. In McElligot’s Pool, it’s the Inuit or Eskimo fish in parkas who swim in from the North Pole. In The Cat’s Quizzer, it’s a question, “How old do you have to be to be a Japanese?”  If these items are racist—which I dispute—they’re also exactly the kind of things children think of all on their own. A Japanese edition of the book sold well until it was banned and, like the other five banned books, became prohibitively expensive.  I’ve always thought of Dr. Seuss as an equal-opportunity satirist, the white and animal images absurd as those of non-white ethnicities.

Dr. Seuss’s books amply fit the definition of what a children’s book should do according to the feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock, namely that good children’s books capture something about the experience of being a child, representing the kinds of things children say and do. Wordsworth got this back in 1798 in the Lyrical Ballads, in poems showing how children understand concepts like death differently from adults. “We are Seven,” for instance, tells the story of a little girl whose brother is buried, but who, in her mind, is alive. What would be considered delusional or even psychotic in an adult is normal in a child; a three-year-old girl I knew burst into tears when her mother told her, “we have no more corn flakes.”

“Yes we do!” cried the little girl. Assertion and denial are normal forms of reasoning for a child.

The term “stereotype” comes from printing, and the original meaning is close to the first meaning of cliché, namely a printer’s block used so frequently that it became worn down—and from that former technology we get the modern meaning of a worn-out and therefore tiresome phrase, like “cat got your tongue?” One source claims the clicking sound made by the cast-iron stereotype during the printing process were called, for onomatopoeic reasons, a “cliché.” The point of a stereotype in printing was to reproduce the same image without changes. The sameness is the objection most people naturally now dislike—any representation of any ethnicity suggesting “they” are all alike, and all alike in an unflattering way. Whoever “they” are, they’re dehumanized, because not individualized.

This is also an aesthetic problem, because it there’s one thing a stereotype lacks, it’s an individual artist’s style. When I compare stereotypes of black people in Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo to those Theodore Geisel produced as a college student, I see little difference. The uniformly bug-eyed, bloated-lipped look of the Hergé figures echoes those in Geisel’s early work. If Tintin did not appear in Hergé’s drawing and if Geisel hadn’t signed his own, it would be hard to say who drew them. They’re generically racist drawings, with only hints of either artist’s mature signature style. Likewise, the golliwog dolls invented by Florence Kate Upton and which are based on the blackface minstrel tradition have a generic quality; the point of them is that they’re stereotypes and they do all look alike to the point where it’s hard to tell, from an unidentified drawing, which artist is responsible.

How different from caricature. Court Jones defines caricature as “a portrait where the proportions are changed to highlight what makes a person different from everyone else (or the average).” A caricature exaggerates individual traits—physical traits—in order to reveal personality. If caricatures are all about individual characteristics, stereotypes are all about groups. That’s why you can hardly tell the golliwog-style black people in an early Dr. Seuss cartoon apart from the ones in Tintin in the Congo or some of Enid Blyton’s Noddy illustrations. But in Dr. Seuss’s mature work—which is to say in the six banned books—what we’re seeing is caricatures of himself.

He was known to his friends and acquaintances as childish, childlike and solitary. He disliked social events and behaved like a naughty child at them—at an event held at a department store he disappeared and was found in the Ladies Shoes Department marking down boxes of shoes he considered too expensive. He didn’t like children—possibly seeing them as competition for the sole focus of attention he desired—and said, “You make ’em, I’ll amuse ’em.” He was a child himself—that’s why it was easy for him to represent the experience of children. Every figure he drew in his now (tragically) banned books wears a childish expression, regardless of species or ethnicity. His ethnically diverse and invented people and animals are equally naughty, haughty, “hee-hee, getting away with it!” defiant, followed by “oops, we’re busted.” Dr. Seuss is also “perverse” in the Freudian sense. Take a long look at the “R” section of Dr. Seuss’s ABC. A little girl, Rosy Robin Ross, is “going riding on her red rhinoceros.” Observe that “rhinoceros.”  Especially his “nose” and the pendulous items beneath it. The photo is a confession of sorts; the hangdog expression says it all. Dr Seuss might as well be saying, “Ok, I’ve been a naughty boy and I’ll take my punishment from Rosy’s little whip.” Every white figure, every black figure, every Chinese or Arab or Russian or Turkish figure, has Dr. Seuss’s wishes, hopes, fears and dreams written all over it. These are not ethnic slurs, but self-caricatures, caricatures rendering his style unmistakeable: he’s spoofing his every childish and childlike desire.

Again: these images are not stereotypes; they are highly individual revelations about himself. Again: that ability to reveal himself is a hallmark of his style, the quality distinguishing a Dr. Seuss drawing from a stereotype. His non-white figures are—like his white figures—absurd portraits of himself. Without this feature there’s no artistry. And what about folk art? Might one argue that his drawings are folk art, in the sense of offering a peculiarly American sense of originality and possibility—of the optimism so often inherent in American triumphs and tragedies?

The best folk art has upon it the stamp of the individual artist, even if it includes features typically deemed offensive or racist. I have a small figurine of a black woman, a gift my husband bought from a local artist, a person of color, at the hippie market in Rio de Janeiro. The figure has the kind of hair and lips featured in stereotypical representations of black people in the early Dr. Seuss, in Hergé and in the golliwog dolls:

But she’s far more an individual portrait than a stereotype. We were drawn to the look of How-Dare-You defiance in her eyebrows and hair; she impressed us as a strong woman who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

Although persons with white skin are typically perceived as stereotyping other ethnicities, this is hardly a white-person problem; it’s just human. In his 1998 critique of affirmative action, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, suggesting that the policy increases divisions and racism, the ultra-conservative Indian writer Dinesh d’Souza tells a personal anecdote. A native of Mumbai, he came to Arizona as a high school exchange student. A month into his stay, his host parents encouraged him to invite a girl to the Homecoming dance. “I approached a pretty young woman who said she would ask her parents but would let me know tomorrow,” he writes. The next day, he asked what they’d said. “Who?” said she, puzzled. He realized he’d asked the wrong girl; “I thought all white women looked alike.” (22)

The point being: humans of every ethnicity have their mental images of persons not belonging to that ethnicity. “They all look alike” is a universal problem. A college student I know, a Westerner, studied in China for a year, and got used to dodging Chinese people who wanted a photo. Some took pictures of him without his consent; a photo of “one of them!” seemed a mark of status. He was as much an exotic type—or stereotype—to them as Japanese people were to Westerners before American culture became broadly multicultural, before neighborhood became less segregated. A New York Jewish friend fluent in Japanese got used to overhearing Japanese ladies on the Tokyo subway discuss him: “Look at that ugly foreigner!” one would say, and the other would reply, “Foreigners stink, don’t you think?” In his impeccable Japanese, he would turn to say, “Good day, Ladies!” and enjoy watching them flinch.

If we’re going to talk about “offensive images” and racism, there should be some distinction made between stereotypes, caricatures and folk art. The prejudice my New York friend experienced can be counteracted with friendly commentary—not DEI! Caricature and folk art share many of the same properties, displaying individual expressions of emotion and culture. Stereotypes are flatter, displaying neither. In a world of broad categories, the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” world of victims and oppressors, of “whiteness” and guilt, we’re inundated by stereotypes. Art can find its way out of stereotypes, and in the next few posts, I’ll be showing how that’s what each of Dr. Seuss’s banned books does.