Take a Ride Down Mulberry Street

And to think anyone saw racism

One image of “a Chinese man who eats with sticks”—in the original 1937 version, “a Chinaman who eats with sticks”— struck the editors at Random House as racist, along with images of Asian people in other Dr. Seuss books.

I have one David Hunter, contributor to a subreddit, to thank for his thoughts on Dr. Seuss’s lovely And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, currently banned for its “outdated portraits of Asian people”.  In 2020, Hunter wrote the following on a subreddit,

About Dr. Seuss, let me address one supposed "racist" image. That is the depiction of a Chinese person in a pointed hat and slanted eyes. In the 1980's I was a little kid and I went to China. I was there for 6 months during typhoon season. One of the areas I was in was a beautiful rural area called, Guilin . . .  one of the most beautiful places in the world with tall, impossibly arched mountains surround by rings of clouds, rainbows everywhere, and rice fields. Every worker wore those supposed racist "pointy" hats. We called them Guilin hats. They are made from reeds of grass and are very sturdy. No one used umbrellas. They would be torn apart by heavy rains and high winds. Instead they covered themselves in plastic ponchos and wore Guilin hats with simple sandals on their feet. Everyone, not just the field workers, wore Guilin hats. It was common throughout China. Typhoon season is in the summer and it's hot. When it rains it rains buckets of water. The depiction of a Chinese man with a pointed hat and chopsticks in Dr. Seuss is not racist . . .Those pointy Guinlin hats are masterpieces of design. They were green before green existed. They are all-natural, repell the rain, and could be used as kindle when worn out. Many cities in China are modern and cutting-edge. Perhaps recent generations of Chinese have never seen a Guilin hat. They are more familiar with baseball hats and western wear. Still, we must not erase history. To say that Guilin hats are racist is ignorant.

Exactly. And those hats are still around. Very around. Not just in China, but in many Asian places. Because they’re practical defenses against heavy rains and burning sun.

This brings me back to the reason for the ban, namely that conical Asian hats are perceived as contributing to “outdated” portraits of Asian people. Which begs the question: what would an up-to-date portrait of an Asian person be? A Westernized one? A man in a suit? Somebody who’s assimilated to Western culture?

If “outdated” means “appearing in clothing typical to that person’s ethnic background” then that sounds racist to me. And, alas, typical of the immigrant experience in the United States. I think of Philip Roth’s 1959 short story, “Eli the Fanatic,” in which a young Jewish lawyer is asked by his assimilated Jewish suburban community to deal with what is to them an embarrassment—a group of Orthodox European refugees, a rabbi and eighteen orphaned boys, who wear side curls or payos, who dress in broad-brimmed dark hats, who speak Yiddish, have moved into the neighborhood. Eli is tasked with expelling the group, officially because the rabbi is running a school in a residential zone, but actually because they are such identifiably Eastern European Askenazim.

In other words: they don’t look like us. They don’t talk like us. They don’t eat like us. But yikes, they are us. Or they’re the past we’re eager to suppress, since looking like them prejudiced people against us and we all remember the pogroms.

This horror of difference, of being ostracized for one’s difference, is, of course, ultimately true of most Americans. We all came from someplace else. There was once a time when someone in all of our families was outsider, and the marker of the outsider is always the accent, the clothes, the food, or the religion. To get accepted, does one hide these differences? “Yes” has been the answer of some immigrant groups; “passing” as a different ethnicity or race is as old as the republic. Passing and assimilation didn’t originate with the colonies or the American government. Suspicion about outsiders, prejudice against them, dehumanization of them, is as old as humanity. Erasing the difference—which seems to be what those who censor Dr. Seuss wish to do—is no answer.

Moving on to the other supposedly offensive images: the child narrator, Marco, imagines a blue elephant “with plenty of fun in his eyes,”

And then, just to give him a little more tone,

Have a Rajah, with rubies, perched high on his throne.

The Rajah portrait is another “stereotype?” Disrespectful? But Marco is most complimentary; he admires the Rajah, who like every other figure emanating from his fertile imagination, has the same silly smile—the Dr. Seuss grin, or the Dr. Seuss nose-in-the-air smirk. And if one looks at historic portraits and photos of Rajahs, of which there are many, (and here’s another and yet another) then I don’t see either a stereotype or an insult. The costume Dr. Seuss reproduces is pretty accurate, the facial expression his own. Again, he’s an equal opportunity satirist: he makes fun of himself, and versions of himself, in every animal species, including imaginary ones, and in just about every ethnic group.

How about the portraits of white people—there’s a particularly silly one of a white guy in a toga, driving a chariot pulled by a zebra— are these “outdated?” White guys in togas did ride in chariots once upon a time. So did dark-skinned guys in togas, since Ancient Rome and Greece were ethnically diverse. Are imaginary creatures also outdated? The zebra isn’t a real zebra—it’s a mischievous, grinning, prancing representation of the personality of Dr. Seuss. Just like every other human or animal in the book. What distinguishes each figure in his oeuvre is the facial expression, not the ethnicity.

I haven’t even gotten to the Inuit people! They’re having a ball in their parkas, riding along in a sleigh pulled by a reindeer. They look happy. They are wearing warm outfits, the kind people wore in the arctic before climate change.

Which is what we should all be fussing about. Not the lovely images in this delightful book. If you can’t afford whatever it’s selling for now that it’s out of print, you can find it in this internet archive, or follow along with this charming reading on YouTube. (But as of this writing, the price on Amazon has gone down from the hundreds to about $14.99).

Even so, I can imagine some teachers and some mothers saying, “But what if I read this to an ethnically diverse group of kids, some of whom are Chinese or Indian or Inuit?”

What if you do? Wait to see what the kids say. If you assume they’re going to be disturbed, ask a question or two:

“Did you know that a long time ago—two hundred years ago—there were leaders in India called Rajahs?” (Here’s where you could show them a photo or two, provided above). Or “Did you know that Chinese people came to the United States to work on the railroads at around the same time? They wore the same clothes they’d worn back in China.” Or even, “people living in their neighborhoods were mostly white, and thought the Chinese skin color looked yellow. Are white people white? Or maybe pink? What do you think?”

Before you tell them any depiction of a skin color is racist, wait to see what the children want to know. Make your history lesson an answer to the questions they ask, not the ones you’re sure they ought to know in order to avoid becoming racist. You don’t need to worry that they’re budding racists even if they say something you’d consider racist in an adult. They are children. They’ll adopt your own attitude, which is presumably anything but racist.

Always, wait to see their reactions before diving into commentary. Maybe they will want to know more. But maybe they’ll just want one of those cool conical Guilin hats.