A week or so ago, I sent out our final newsflash to our mentor teachers sharing a few resources and thanking them for the work they did with our interns at SPU. It actually took a long time to write a short newsletter as there was so much to try to synthesize, and I was doing my best to make the email something that would be worthy of their time (as we are all overloaded with emails and resources right now). I included the following image at the bottom of the email that I had seen on Facebook during Teacher Appreciation Week.
One teacher wrote back with the following message:
"Thanks for the kind words!
Just one piece of information related to the Dr. Seuss graphic. There are Black educators who are calling for the removal of Dr. Seuss images due to his ties to anti-Blackness and white supremacy. More information can be found here: https://www.theconsciouskid.org/blog/2018/2/18/a-critical-race-reading-of-dr-seuss "
I read the article she shared and then dug into some others as well, and I learned that Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist before he was a children's book author. Many of those images were overtly racist drawings of Japanese Americans during WWII. As I began looking more critically at the review of his children's books, I saw that some racist images were hidden in plain sight in some of the classics.
Katie Ishizuka writes, "In addition to how people of color are portrayed in his children's books through Orientalist and anti-Black stereotypes and caricatures, they are almost always presented as subservient, and peripheral to, the white characters." She points out that the Cat in the Hat is based on minstrel stereotypes.
While some have said that we can't blame Dr. Suess and that he was just a product of his time, the research also noted this compelling statement: “[N]ot all White people ‘of his time’ engaged in overt racism or used their platforms to disseminate racist narratives and images nationally and globally, as he did. There are White people throughout history, and of his generation, who actively resisted racism and risked their lives and careers to stand up against it.”
pictures I found from times we've pulled out
our Dr. Seuss hat from our costume box over the years
The conclusion of the article from Teaching Tolerance magazine helps me to think about this issue in particular and also about other areas where I am learning and growing in conversations now about race:
"You don’t have to burn your favorite Thing One shirt or get rid of all of your Dr. Seuss books or cut Green Eggs and Ham from your diet (unless you just really want to). However, we all need to be willing to explore the things that shape the young minds of our students—and be willing to change our own minds when presented with new truths, even if they might not always be comfortable to process.
As Geisel scholar Philip Nel writes, the work of Dr. Seuss “contains both much to admire and much to oppose.” Yet, it is up to each of us to follow Seuss’s own advice from Oh, the Places You'll Go! “Face up to your problems / whatever they are.’” And we should do so, even if that means Geisel and Seuss’ works themselves are at the center of some of those problems."
other articles:
https://www.scarymommy.com/beloved-dr-seuss-racist/
https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=cat-hat-racist-read-across-america-shifts-away-dr-seuss-toward-diverse-books
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