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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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.
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