PhDeac
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Dr. Seuss’ racial ideology doesn’t seem all that crazy for a white man born in 1904. He held some pretty horrible views and then he changed some of them over time. I don’t know why we shouldn’t respect the wishes of those who’s survived him to take a few books out of publication.
Would you want to be remembered for the most racist stuff you've done? Probably not. Dr. Seuss' people feel the same way, so they're not publishing it. I don't see the controversy over this.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2230928...i-ran-the-zoo-mulberry-street-mcgelliots-pool
Humans are complicated, so many of us have complicated legacies. It makes sense for people to want to deemphasize the negative and emphasize the positive of someone's life.
The Whos in Whoville are just fine. This is not:
So yeah, I'm pissed to see people defending this and hiding behind "cancel culture."
Would you want to be remembered for the most racist stuff you've done? Probably not. Dr. Seuss' people feel the same way, so they're not publishing it. I don't see the controversy over this.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2230928...i-ran-the-zoo-mulberry-street-mcgelliots-pool
[h=3]Some of Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons were unabashedly liberal and ahead of their time. Others were wildly racist.[/h] Dr. Seuss’s work for adults includes some pretty unambiguously racist images. Husband-and-wife team Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, who run the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, developed a study of Dr. Seuss’s history of racism that features a small sampling.
One ad Dr. Seuss drew for Flit insecticide featured a disgusted white woman saying to a Black man, “You hold a job, Worthless? Say, ni**er, when you hold a job a week, mosquitos will brush their teeth with Flit and like it!’” Dr. Seuss tended to draw Black people as cannibals or monkeys, and they weren’t the only racial group he caricatured.
Beginning well before the lead-up to World War II, Dr. Seuss frequently drew Japanese people with animalistic features who were violent threats to America, referred to them as “Japs,” and captioned them with jokey lines that replaced their Rs with Ls. “Velly Scary Jap-in-the-Box,” reads the caption for one cartoon of a Japanese man crawling out of a box labeled “JAP WAR THREAT.” He also drew caricatures of Jewish people with oversize noses causing chaos everywhere they went by demanding lower prices.
Notably, Dr. Seuss also drew cartoons decrying Jim Crow laws, the policies of Nazi Germany, and American isolationism. Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons, Maus author Art Spiegelman writes in the foreword to the 1999 book Dr. Seuss Goes to War, “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period.” In fact, Dr. Seuss, Spiegelman argues, drew “virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and Black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism.”I
Dr. Seuss was on the right side of history in many ways — and he also drew a lot of really virulently racist stuff. That’s his legacy as a cartoonist.
Humans are complicated, so many of us have complicated legacies. It makes sense for people to want to deemphasize the negative and emphasize the positive of someone's life.
[h=3]There are very few characters of color in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. The ones that do appear are racist caricatures.[/h] There aren’t that many racial caricatures in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books, mostly because there aren’t that many nonwhite characters in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens counted 45 characters of color among the 2,240 human characters who appear in Dr. Seuss’s 50 books, which works out to just 2 percent. Notably, all of those characters are male. There are no girls or women of color in the Dr. Seuss canon.
And when characters of color do appear in these books, they appear as racial caricatures. In their study, Ishizuka and Stephens found that all 45 characters of color were either subservient, exotified, dehumanized, or some combination of the three. Dr. Seuss’s characters of color drive carriages for whip-wielding white characters, dress in turbans and “rice paddy hats,” and never speak out loud. Most of them are Orientalist caricatures, and the two that aren’t are those African characters drawn as monkeys in If I Ran the Zoo.
The Whos in Whoville are just fine. This is not:
So yeah, I'm pissed to see people defending this and hiding behind "cancel culture."
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