DR SEUSS AND THE LOOSE GOOSE IN MY CABOOSE
Fox News is flipping out over Dr Seuss and Neanderthals. Because those are the REAL problems facing America.
The Neanderthal thing is of course silly. And, you know, so is the Dr Seuss thing, but it’s the more bloggable of the two, since it involves books, censorship and the whole cancel culture “debate”.
So:
1. Let’s start with the acknowledgment that “cancel culture” is already a politically loaded (and thus meaningless) term. Conservatives use it the same way they use the term “political correctness”: a catch-all defense for racist/sexist/homophobic behavior in the name of some vague freedom to do and say anything you want with no social consequences whatsoever.
2. Whatever you think “cancel culture” is, the Dr Seuss saga hardly qualifies. For one thing, Dr Seuss Enterprises (i.e. the organization that controls the copyrights of Geisel’s works) made the decision on their own to stop printing six books. No one pressured them to do so. And they’re also fine with the decision to decouple Reading Across America from Dr Seuss books - which I am also fine with because believe it or not, there are plenty of great children’s books out there that are not written Dr Seuss, so why focus on just one author?
3. Also, as has been pointed out, no librarians (as far as I know) are pulling Dr Seuss books from library shelves - not even the six that will be discontinued.
4. We also have to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Geisel did use racist stereotypes in his work. Not all of it - most of it can be found in his WW2 propaganda cartoons, which were both decidedly anti-fascist and horribly racist in terms of depicting Asians. Of course, most of his books don’t contain racist stereotypes, so there’s that. And sure, you can find a number of ethnic people who aren’t offended by those images and take it in stride as the embedded racism of the times. But some are. And anyway, there’s a bigger point here: America can’t get past its racism problem until it admits that it has one, and that this problem didn’t spring up out of nowhere but is arguably by design. That includes acknowledging that books like the Seuss Six have racist stereotypes in them.
5. Which is why, for me, all of this is the latest instalment in the ongoing debate of how we should be looking at racist pop culture in the modern world. In a way, it’s also part of the adjacent discussion of whether art created by racists, sexists, homophobes, misogynists and other awful people should still be acknowledged as part of legitimate pop culture. (Or to put it another way, can I still like Woody Allen movies or Roald Dahl books with a clear conscience?)
The general worry is that once we brand a particular book, film or song as racist/sexist/homophobic, it will be deleted from the pop-culture canon (either literally or through people refusing to consume it). Which does present a paradox of sorts: can we acknowledge our racist past whilst simultaneously deleting or omitting pop-culture evidence of that past? At the same time, should a society that values free speech be deleting or omitting ideas it finds offensive?
As I say, it’s an old debate. Personally, I like the approach of Warner Brothers, which owns the Looney Tunes cartoons, as well as Tom & Jerry. Both series include cartoons using racist stereotypes, and the studio had to decide whether to censor those scenes or keep them intact for home video releases. They decided to leave them uncensored but include a pre-roll disclaimer (first as a slide, later as a Whoopi Goldberg intro) that says this:
The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed. [Italics mine]
(Disney+ is doing something similar, though they're arguably doing it a bit too quietly.)
Maybe Dr Seuss Enterprises might consider a similar approach for the Seuss Six.
Not that it would make the Fox News heads any less calm. But then they're paid to be indignantly outraged over this stuff.
The doctor is in,
This is dF
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