Bunch of people I know are telling me Dr Seuss used racism in his books, but whenever I try to Google I can’t find any examples.
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These books have been taken off the market and are no longer sold. I don’t recall the names of them but they are from a long time ago.
I mean, he illustrated pro-war propaganda cartoons during WWII that involve some…unflattering depictions of Japanese people, to put it mildly.
Can you explain how you’re searching because in all honesty it’s not that hard to come up with at least something as a starting point. Saying you ‘can’t find any examples’ AT ALL is a little bit suspicious.
His books aren’t too overtly racist, however as a cartoonist in the late 30s and 40s (WWII) his portrayl of Japanese people was incredibly racist. Googling image searching Seuss WWII cartoons should give you a sense of what everyone is telling you about.
[This news story](https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513) provides a concise rundown of why some of the books are no longer in print:
>Six Dr. Seuss books — including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo” — will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy said Tuesday.
“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.
The wartime propaganda was pretty bad. I don’t think the war excuses it.
But the books that have been self-censored are not hateful. They have some very insensitive portrayals, but they’re not going to teach children to hate people who are different. I suppose it could teach them it’s okay to point out when people are different than you, which is not good. The drawings are “othering”. But when you read the story to your kid you can point that out and explain how things have changed, which is better than sanitizing the past. Check out Whoopie Goldberg’s opening comments on the Looney Toons collection, which you can see on YouTube.
And honestly, when it happened I went through them all and tried to see if they could be fixed. They could. The portrayals are incidental to the story. There are a couple of insensitive stereotypes in the artwork that could be easily removed. And in two minutes I thought of replacement rhymes for Mulberry Street and the others that would fill the gap, keep the cadence, and wallpaper over the racist stuff.
I don’t think the books had to go down the memory hole.
Of course, some people probably have PDFs and hard copies that they will share with future generations, enjoying the books and creating the opportunity to talk about what is and is not a hurtful thing to say. So maybe they won’t go down the memory hole.
Have you READ Mr Brown and Mr Black!!!???
Well, here’s the thing: Geisel did use racist imagery and terms that would be considered racist under modern scrutiny.
Geisel was born in 1904, so by the standards of his time, some of the things he said were socially acceptable and not considered derogatory, or the perception of the was not broadly seen as derogatory. Others… plainly were, prior to his Dr. Seuss days some of his advertising and War comics are plainly and insultingly racist as part of either advertising of the time, or as part of propaganda efforts during War.
**However**, during the Civil Rights movement he had a major change of heart towards his views that he understood while commonplace were hurtful and bigoted.
For a number of his books he either changed word choices, drawings / illustrations, or just outright stopped publishing books. The Seuss foundation no longer publishes at least 7 books. “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.”
And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was banned because the book has an illustration of an Asian person wearing a conical hat while eating from a bowl with chopsticks. Published in 1937, this was Dr. Seuss’ first published children’s book.
1950’s If I Ran the Zoo ceased publication due to the depiction of barefoot African men wearing grass skirts as well as Asian characters in conical hats, and additional Asian characters carrying a white man on their heads.
McElligot’s Pool was published in 1947 and has been targeted for the use of Eskimos to describe a fish that swims from the North Pole to McElligot’s Pool
On Beyond Zebra, published in 1955 has a character called Nazzim of Bazzim, which was deemed to be racist.
Scrambled Eggs Super was published in 1953 and contains an illustration featuring five people from a place near the North Pole called Fa-Zoal wearing hooded fur coats typically used by what used to be called Eskimos.
The Cat’s Quizzer is the newest book by Dr. Seuss to face criticism for racist images. Published in 1976, the book has a character of Japanese heritage that has a bright yellow face, is standing on Mt. Fuji, and is referred to as “a Japanese.”
You can kind of see that there is a progression going on here. As what constitutes racism and bigotry evolves or our sensitivity to it does, so too does the acceptability of the body of work.
If you’re asking about how this came to attention, the most likely cause was a 2019 Study of his work that purported much more of it to be racist, bigoted, etc. Some of the findings are questionable and the study doesn’t do much to differentiate between views of today vs. views of the times. Nor does it capture that Geisel upon learning about how some of his work was unintentionally mean-spirited or hurtful tried to change it and did try to make amends. He was a “convert” the cause. However, converting racists doesn’t have the same social credit in the modern environment.
People wishing to tear down his legacy don’t focus on the good or the positive change and efforts. Rather, they see pushback against their claims as confirmation of them. Towards the end of his life he did an interview and as an old man was challenged on something that IIRC was claimed to be Anti-Semitic or Anti-Arabic. He pushed back that it wasn’t and that led to more accusations.
So I think the **TL;DR** version is, by today’s standards he WAS racist, some of the examples of his racism have been removed by either himself or by the people he asked to safeguard his legacy, and that his views, attitudes, and behaviors changed during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
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