If I Ran the Publishing Industry

We wouldn't mistake caricature for racism

Academics cancelling Dr. Seuss employ at least one of the following: disease metaphor, polysyllabic jargon (like “exotification”) or barefaced assertion: “If I Ran the Zoo is undeniably racist . . .”

In his 2017 book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black, Philip Nel claims that hidden racism is “resilient, sneaky, and endlessly adaptable” (1) —as if it were metastatic cancer. (Ibram X. Kendi pushes the same line, referring to racism as stage four cancer.) Nel harps on the theme, calling racism a “persistent social disease” (25) that can “infect” your children (67) if you read them the wrong books.

Or if you read the books the wrong way, that is, for fun instead of as lessons in American apartheid. Failing to spot hidden cues means saddling the poor kid with a lifelong case of racism.

Paging through Nel’s book, I knew I’d seen this type of rhetoric before, and it dawned on me where: in Victorian manuals dedicated to expunging “secret vice” (if not in fin-de-siècle theories of  degeneration). Yes, these are the scare tactics employed by Victorian purveyors of pamphlets on “secret vice” or “moral pollution” or “solitary vice”—all euphemisms for masturbation, then believed to be the cause of numerous physical and emotional ailments and (like “anti-racism”) something that sneaks up on a mother. So difficult to detect! The followers of Seventh-Day Adventist activist and prolific pamphleteer, Ellen G. White, still carry on about supposed zinc depletion resulting from masturbation. I remember a likely story (alas, I have no source) of a Victorian women handing out pamphlets on secret vice, finally getting around to reading one, and realizing she’d been a secret-vicer all her life!

That’s the state of affairs we’re in with cancellations of Dr. Seuss, especially with If I Ran the Zoo, which caricatures just about everybody on the racial spectrum and plenty of animals—the book ridicules more white persons than persons of color because there are more white persons in it. White supremacy? Or just the way neighborhoods were divided in 1950, the year of the book’s publication? What Dr. Seuss saw around him, so what he drew?

The author and activist Christopher Myers, with whom Nel reinforces his own argument, asks whether the murder of Trayvon Martin could be linked to the paucity of nonwhite characters in children’s books: “I wondered: if the man who killed Trayvon Martin had read The Snowy Day as a kid, would it have been as easy for him to see a seventeen-year-old in a hoodie, pockets full of rainbow candies and sweet tea, as a threat? What might have been different if images of round-headed Peter and his red hood and his snow angels were already dancing in his head?” He’s referring to Ezra Jack Keats’s 1962 lovely picture book detailing the adventures of Peter, a small black boy exploring his neighborhood the day after a heavy snowfall.

The short answer is no. The longer answer involves a gun in untrained hands, America’s terrible gun laws, and two men struggling with each other on a dark, cold rainy night. Myths growing up around that killing are epitomized by Sharon Old’s moving poem conjuring Martin as an innocent. The Pulitzer-Prize winning poet’s “For You,”  imagines him as a defenseless child. It’s a lovely elegy to a mother’s will to protect, but Martin wasn’t helpless. He wasn’t a bad kid, but he’d picked fights, dealt pot and stolen.  

 He was 5’11 and 158 pounds at the time of his death. A good four inches taller than Zimmerman. There was some sort of altercation resulting in Zimmerman being injured. One version of the story, portraying Martin as the aggressor, seems to exonerate Zimmerman, in the sense that Martin jumped him and not the other way around. But Zimmerman had a gun, and was warned by local police not to pursue Martin. Whether he did so, whether he did so intentionally or whether the gun went off as Martin banged Zimmerman’s head on the sidewalk remains unclear—but this was no random racist attack. If race must be involved, Zimmerman’s Afro-Peruvian descent isn’t irrelevant.

The idea that this situation would have ended differently if Zimmerman’s mom had read him The Snowy Day is ludicrous. It might have ended differently if the police had managed to get there four minutes earlier.

Asserting a connection between the Black Lives Matter movement, Trayvon Martin’s killer, and racism in children’s books, Nel’s narrative is built on slim foundations indeed. You’d have to assume a direct connection between George Zimmerman’s education and his presumed (and unproved) racism, You’d have to assume that all parents and all children react in exactly the same ways to the same stories and illustrations. You’d have to assume that any stylistic feature in a racist scenario—a type of hat or bowtie, gloves, even the term “cat”—automatically broadcasts racism in all contexts. Instead, why not observe how spontaneously artists select a color, a shape or a sound because it’s appealing to them in the moment.

Because there’s blackface and there’s blackface. I’ve never seen an academic discussion that doesn’t begin with a nod to the “obvious racism” of the genre. In other words, “all blackface is alike”—isn’t that a limited, if not a racist view? Oh, to see Al Jolson perform “Mammy”—he wasn’t mocking or “appropriating” anyone’s tragedy; he was paying tribute to the will to transcend suffering. His grasp of Jewish suffering and of feeling oppressed by orthodox Judaism found its best expression when he identified himself with the oppression of African-Americans.

Much of Nel’s argument relies on the assumption of racial markers triggering racism; he interprets, for instance, white gloves on the Cat in the Hat, on Bugs Bunny and Micky Mouse, on Raggedy Ann and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz (39) as holdovers from black minstrel shows and vaudeville. I’ll halfway go along with that, since Dr Seuss was aware of the blackface tradition and had performed in blackface as a college student. Then again, Al Jolson wore white gloves too.

When I was a child, white gloves were what our white doormen wore, what the girls in my class who went to social dancing school got to wear with their pretty dresses on Fridays, and what I sometimes saw on the hands of waiters and elevator operators. My first knowledge of minstrel shows came sometime in college or after, and I saw no connection to the Cat in the Hat or any other figure mentioned by Nel. The manic activities of Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat, The Cat in the Hat, Micky Mouse and others Nel connects to blackface have numerous other associations as well. Nel points approvingly to Michelle Abate’s notion that Dr. Seuss’s Grinch “echoes nineteenth-century caricatures of the Irish.” (37-8). Even if this is true—which I doubt—it has nothing to do with how twentieth and twenty-first century children and parents respond to the images.

An ethnic perception inspiring an artist to produce a cartoon in a particular style is mediated through the artist’s feelings as well as the feelings and environment of those enjoying the cartoon. Why assume that the person laughing at the cartoon feels what the artist felt? Why assume a knowledge of love or hatred, of racial intent, in the artist’s inspiration?

Naïve, spontaneous caricature isn’t racism. Racism is an expression of hatred or at the very least contempt. But you can’t find that in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books; what you do find, everywhere, in each expression and lighting the eyes of every single animal or person, is a lively sense of the absurd.

This gets us to the polysyllabic jargon approach to Dr. Seuss, epitomized by Katie Ishizuka’s and Ramón Stephens’ 2019 essay, “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books. Sample:

Exotification, stereotypes, and dominance are commonly portrayed when depicting

characters with East Asian characteristics. Twelve of the fourteen characters with East Asian

characteristics are of unknown country or ethnicity.

As if Dr. Seuss were aiming to identify the countries or ethnicities of his Asian characters? His point is that he’s making up everything. Rather, he’s inserting his personal quirks, his mischievousness, into every figure, so that the images he draws are not of elephants, fantastic creatures, or any real human being, but snapshots of his own moods and impulses.

At least, that is how I understood images now deemed “racist.” In If I Ran the Zoo, these guys are invariably held up as examples of “exotification” and therefore egregious racism. Most commentary refers to the lips and the grass skirts or even the “tutus” on the men; all that plus the topknots supposedly equals racism. When the book was read to the five-year-old me, the color of the men—the fact that they were black men—didn’t register. I saw black men in my neighborhood, and if they’d been dressed in grass skirts and top knots I would have stared; both would have been unusual for the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I took it for granted that in faraway countries, people dressed differently.

Then there’s the other offensive image, and the line about helpers who “wear their eyes at a slant.” Is that a racist remark or an observation? The epicanthic fold is a standard feature of East Asian ethnicities as well as some European ones.

I’d go along with the notion the line is racist if the Asian and black figures were being ridiculed and the white figures and animals were not. But every single face in the book is an exaggerated portrait, intended to be outrageous. The book’s hero, “young Gerald McGrew” is pictured on top of the caged Bustard being carried by said helpers, not because he’s in a position of “white dominance” but because he’s the one imagining the zoo. It’s his zoo—he, the small child, is now completely in charge. That’s every child’s fantasy.

If I Ran the Circus, if I Ran the Zoo, if I ran the industry libelously attributing racism to these stories celebrating life and adventure, I’d do things differently, that’s what I’d do:

Tell artists and writers to laugh, not be serious

To all the un-humorous I’d say, “Please don’t query us.”