(03-02-2021, 04:11 PM)homebiscuit Wrote: Dr. Seuss is canceled for other sins:

The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books (stkate.edu)

...Background

Seuss’ History Publishing Racist Works

 In the 1920s, Dr. Seuss published anti-Black and anti-Semitic cartoons in Dartmouth’s
humor magazine, the Jack-O-Lantern. He depicted a Jewish couple (captioned “the Cohen’s”)
with oversized noses and Jewish merchants on a football field with “Quarterback Mosenblum”
refusing to relinquish the ball until a bargain price as been established for the goods being sold
(Cohen 208). In the same issue of Jack-O-Lantern, Seuss drew Black male boxers as gorillas.
His cartoons, advertisements, and writings often exhibited explicit anti-Black racism. He
consistently portrayed Africans and African Americans as monkeys and cannibals—often
holding spears, surrounded by flies, and wearing grass skirts. In Judge magazine and College
2
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Vol. 1, Iss. 2 [2019], Art. 4
https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/4
Humor, he published over a dozen cartoons depicting Black people as monkeys and repeatedly
captioned them as “n*ggers” (Cohen 212-13). For example, a cartoon Seuss made for Judge
magazine in 1929 depicts a group of thick-lipped Black men up for sale to White men. The sign
above them reads: “Take Home A High-Grade N*gger For Your Wood Pile” (Cohen 213). Other
captions he used with his images of Black people included: “Disgusted wife: ‘You hold a job,
Worthless? Say, n*gger, when you hold a job a week, mosquitos will brush their teeth with Flit
and like it!’” (Cohen 213) and “My, my, n*gger, what an impression youse goin’ to make when
you deliver this here wash to my clients” (Cohen 212). In 1928, in the first ever artwork that he
signed as “Dr. Seuss,” he drew a racist cartoon of a Japanese woman and children. The caption
spells the word “children” as “childlen,” which reflects the stereotype that Japanese people can’t
say their “R’s” (Cohen 86). Seuss’ racist depictions of Japanese people has been rationalized by
Seuss scholars as “war hysteria,” but this cartoon precedes his anti-Japanese propaganda during
World War II by over a decade. The same year, he launched the seventeen-year advertising
campaign he created for Flit insecticide that first made him famous (Nel, “Dr. Seuss” 6). Many
of these Flit ads featured racist and xenophobic depictions of Arabs, Muslims, and Black people
as caricatures or monkeys in subservient positions to White men...

Nobody remembers Flit insecticide.
Dr Seuss is not remembered for insecticide advertisements in the 1920s.
He's remembered for children books that he wrote starting in the 1930s, but really his best remembered book, the Grinch, was published in 1947.
And he's remembered for The Sneeches, an explicitly anti-racism book.
Now, in the context of a high school level American history class, it would be appropriate to show these racist cartoons from a well-known artist, to show how pervasive racism was in the 1920s.
Teaching about these very obscure and very old cartoons is not appropriate in any other context.  No one is perfect, and we need to overlook the mistakes of great figures like Dr. seuss, to redeem their stories.

---