Was Dr. Seuss a racist?
A cartoonist’s perspective...
So just the other day I’m reading a Kansas City Star article about Dr. Seuss and some of his children’s books that are being withdrawn from the market because of possible racist content (conscious or unconscious) and the story quoted a college professor named Philip Nel who wrote a book called: Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books.
Nel also wrote Dr. Seuss: American Icon and The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats.
And when he wasn’t writing about Dr. Seuss, Nel was writing J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels: A Readers Guide and editing Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature which (as the title suggests) is a collection of stories, poems and comic strips produced by 20th century leftists and includes the harrowing tale of Chicken Little being sent to a gulag for spreading false propaganda among the barnyard proletariat and the only part of this paragraph I made up is the part about Chicken Little.
She was actually tortured, executed and deep fried to a golden brown in the Lubyanka.
Nel appears to have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about children’s literature and Dr. Seuss (whose real name was Theodor Geisel) and has reached some interesting conclusions and we’ll start with the question of the Cat in the Hat’s racial identity.
Part of the reason the Star story caught my eye was a line about the Cat in the Hat’s outfit; top hat, bow tie and white gloves which, according to the article, “radiates a minstrel feel.” So does the Cat in the Hat’s outfit mean the Cat was Black and if the Cat was Black does that somehow mean Dr. Seuss was a racist?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know anything about Theodor Geisel and his state of mind when he wrote The Cat in the Hat, but I do have some experience in cartooning so why don’t we stick with that and see where it gets us?
A White Glove inspection
Some cartoonist (and I can’t remember his name, but it definitely wasn’t “Al Jolson”) told me Walt Disney saved a lot of money by giving Mickey Mouse three fingers because when you have to draw the same character over and over and over for animation, that’s one less finger to worry about.
Knowing that, I figured there was also some reason Mickey Mouse wore white gloves and sure enough, there is.
According to the internet – and I spent about 27 seconds finding this out – Mickey had white gloves because his body was solid black, so any hand gesture that put his hands in front of his body (like praying someone didn’t come along decades later and decide his relationship with Minnie was paternal and chauvinistic) meant his black hands would blend into his black body.
Hand gestures are much easier to see if Mickey wears white gloves.
So…Mickey Mouse wore white gloves so you could see his hands, not because he was about to get down on one knee and sing Mammy, although if that cartoon exists somewhere in a Magic Kingdom underground vault along with Walt Disney’s frozen head I wouldn’t be stunned because it turns out Walt was a pretty weird dude.
But before we get too far off track, let’s get back to those gloves.
White gloves also meant the animators didn’t have to worry about adding details like knuckles or fingernails, so that being the case, lots of cartoon characters wear white gloves. Bugs Bunny for instance and I’m almost positive Bugs Bunny is not Black; in fact, up until now I thought he was a rabbit. (But I also thought the Cat in the Hat was a cat, so what do I know?)
As long as I was looking into cartoon character haberdashery and its hidden meanings, I wondered why Mickey Mouse wears pants and that pervert Donald Duck walks around without them.
I was sure there was an academic grant and book deal in there somewhere and I was thinking of something along the lines of: Was Donald Duck an Exhibitionist? The Hidden Pedophilia of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Fruit of the Looms.
But unfortunately for my writing career, there’s a solid cartoonist reason Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants and once again it doesn’t have anything to do with a hidden agenda; according to at least one internet source – and that’s pretty much all most of us need to start holding firm opinions – some cartoon characters don’t wear pants so animators can add a tail and help identify what species they are.
Porky Pig is a Ken doll up front, but has a pig’s tail and God only knows what that confusing combination of physical attributes is doing to the kids who watch him and naively think he’s a pig that stutters, which come to think of it is sending the nation’s youth the message that it’s OK to ridicule the handicapped, which is perfectly fine if you’re Donald Trump, but morally indefensible if you’re fictional pig.
Anyway…
Another internet source (this one from India) thought: “Donald Duck does not wear pants because they would interfere with production of preen oil, created in a gland in the rump, that makes his feather resistant to water” which tells you some people spend waaay too much time thinking about this stuff and right now, I appear to be one of them.
In my experience most cartoonists do not spend a great deal of time making sure things are 100 percent realistic, which is part of the fun of drawing cartoons: it’s your make-believe world and in your make-believe world things work the way you want them to. For instance: this theater I drew might hold six people if they’d been on a starvation diet and held their breath, but I wasn’t trying to draw a realistic theater, I was drawing a cartoon version of a theater and didn’t feel constrained by reality.
(Little known fact (apparently): cartoonists make shit up.)
The use of symbols, exaggeration and depiction of race
Here’s another quote from Nel about Dr. Seuss:
It’s a trope in Seuss books more generally to treat ethnic and “foreign” others as comic, even if he doesn’t mean it in an aggressively malicious way. He’s not thinking about how making an entire group of people the subject of a joke has that effect.
Cartoonists (and particularly political cartoonists, which Geisel was at one point in his career) create symbols to represent entire groups of people all the time, as in the cartoon below:
I’m making an entire group of people the subject of a joke even though I’m well aware not every Democrat or Republican feels the same way. I’m counting on the fact that my readers aren’t raving lunatics (and have often been disappointed on that score) and will understand that it’s a cartoon symbol for a group of people which may not accurately represent each and every member of that particular group.
Like Uncle Sam:
So a donkey represents Democrats (in general) an elephant represents Republicans (in general) and Uncle Sam represents the United States (in general) and everybody is OK with that…right now.
Check back in 84 years and maybe people will have changed their minds about what’s OK (more on that shortly) and I’ll be considered a war criminal and my kids will have to admit they knew me, but didn’t really like me or share my views on Uncle Sam’s ethnicity. I draw him as White which so far nobody has objected to, but maybe 50 years from now that will make me a racist – too soon to tell.
OK, so cartoonists routinely use symbols to represent groups, but what if you want to cartoon someone from a different race or nation of people?
(Buckle up, things are about to get bumpy.)
Cartoonists use exaggeration all the time and I’ve thrown a Trump cartoon in here to make my point. Rule of cartoonist thumb: if someone’s nose is slightly bigger than normal you make it way bigger than normal and if someone’s nose is slightly smaller than normal you make it way smaller than normal. Which was fine for drawing Donald Trump; most cartoonists drew a giant orange comb over, some bushy eyebrows and pouty lips and bingo-bango you have a cartoon version of the Donald.
Exaggerating physical attributes is OK as long as you exaggerate the physical attributes of the right person.
Try exaggerating the physical attributes of a race and you’re going to wind up with college professors writing books about you. Now the cartoonist is getting into racial stereotypes and that’s a minefield hard to walk your way out of – although I think you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, although if you’re a Lady of the Night I think it’s OK to end an evening with a proposition.
(Whew. Talked my way out of a corner again, although excessive talking is usually how I find myself in a corner to begin with.)
I once picked up a “How to Draw Cartoons” book which gave what I thought was some questionable advice. The book’s author urged his readers to make no attempt to depict race, which – when you think about it and I did – is racist.
It’s essentially saying there is something wrong with Black or Asian or (fill-in-the-blank) features and everyone should be depicted as some acceptable version of White, which is denying reality and I would think, insulting. There are physical differences between some races, otherwise we wouldn’t know which riots to encourage and which riots to deplore.
But exaggerate those physical differences – which is OK to do with White politicians, but almost nobody else – and you’re asking for trouble. So exaggerating physical attributes to identify a race or nation of people is unacceptable; how about using traditional dress? Once again, the rules are confusing.
Beret on a Frenchman: OK.
Sombrero on a Mexican: not OK.
Irishman as a drunken Leprechaun looking for a fight (which is pretty much Notre Dame’s mascot): OK.
Conical straw hat on an Asian: not OK.
Mountie hat on a Canadian: OK.
Turban on a Sikh: hmmm…we’ll have to get a ruling from our political correctness committee which meets biannually and get back to you. In the meantime, it’s OK to draw a keffiyeh on Saudi Arabians because they’re rich and we kind of don’t like them because they have our oil which had the bad taste to wind up under their land.
Putting a cowboy hat on a Texan is not only OK, some Texans would pay you to do it, but maybe sometime in the future someone will decide to get their BVDs in a twist about it and accuse me of stereotyping Texans which I clearly did, but right now nobody has a problem with it.
As you might have noticed, the rules aren’t consistent and what’s OK today might not be OK tomorrow.
Changing standards
Now that everybody is required by the U.S. Constitution to have an opinion about everything, the Kansas City Star ran a column about Dr. Seuss and the woman who wrote it said you can’t excuse what he did as being a product of his time because bigotry was never OK.
Let me call bullshit on that right now. Bigotry was never morally OK, but it has been socially acceptable.
Look back at newspaper headlines from WW2 and it’s pretty clear most Americans were A-OK with bigotry as long as it was aimed at the right people. The word “Jap” was used frequently in headlines and political cartoonists drew our Japanese and Germans enemies using the most negative stereotypes possible and everybody was just fine with that.
Also: we rounded up perfectly innocent Americans of Japanese descent and locked them up in internment camps which we didn’t do to Germans because you couldn’t spot a German just by looking at them…you had to wait for them to invade a neighboring country.
Face it, bigotry was not only OK, it was the official policy of our government and in many ways still is which is a completely different column and we have enough on our plate already so let’s move on.
Dr. Seuss is now being criticized in part because of the way he portrayed a Chinese character in And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, but the book was written in 1937 and nobody had a problem with that portrayal back then (doesn’t make it right, but it does point out standards are always changing) and apparently the portrayal was still OK in 1961 when the book won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
Bigotry was not only OK; they were giving awards for it.
And the award in question was given out by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education so maybe someone ought to shoot a politically correct rocket up their ass for honoring a closet racist and if you really want to be consistent, maybe include U.S. World & News Report on your rectum rocket list because they rated the closet-racist-loving school No. 1 among in its Best Grad School ratings of 2016.
None of which is going to happen because calling Dr. Seuss a racist gets more headlines and attention than going after institutions that supported and encouraged what Theodor Geisel was doing.
In conclusion
OK, I’ve got lots more to say on this subject because it’s one I’ve had to think about for the past 45 years, but this piece is too long already so I better think of a way to wind things up.
So here goes.
I think it’s OK and necessary to re-examine what books we read our children and what statues we put up in the town square and whether or not Woody Allen was about an inch away from endorsing pedophilia when he made Manhattan and had his nerdy 42-year-old character be the object of a hot 17-year-old’s affection which makes it more science fiction than comedy.
Currently, there’s a big market in taking today’s standards and applying them to work produced in the past.
(I’m assuming it’s only a matter of time until someone looks into that fat bastard Santa Claus and his anti-union workshop that forces illegal immigrant elves to work under sweatshop conditions and the animal cruelty involved in requiring eight reindeer to pull enough toys for all the children in the world around the globe in 24 hours. Also, somebody saw their mommy kissing Santa Claus, so clearly Old St. Nick is getting some on the side while Mrs. Claus waits faithfully at the North Pole.)
But…
In my opinion, some statues need to be torn down and maybe Hollywood should hire actors of the appropriate nationality and not just put makeup on White people so they won’t have to deal with someone with an accent. Thinking about bad stuff you’ve done in the past is one of the ways you do better in the future.
But I read pretty much every Dr. Seuss book ever written to my kids and my general impression is that while a few of his images might be outdated now, Theodor Geisel’s heart was in the right place and that maybe ought to count for something.
He wasn’t a racist trying to glorify the Confederate cause or movie director trying to put a romantic glow on pedophilia; he was a cartoonist using imagery that was considered OK at the time he drew it. Doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make Doctor Seuss a candidate for a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard either.
In any case, if we’re going to re-evaluate Dr. Seuss, I figured maybe it wouldn’t hurt to include a cartoonist’s point of view which might explain some of the choices he made.
OK, that’s it.
Just remember we’ve all done or said stuff we regret, but unfortunately for cartoonists our mistakes are recorded with pen and ink.