Six of Dr. Seuss’ Books Banned
By: Julia Zhou
3/16/2021
Since the late 1900s, Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, has been a source of entertainment and tradition for children and adults alike. His most famous works, like The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Green Eggs and Ham, and more have helped build a multi-million dollar industry of children’s books. However, some of Seuss’ books have been controversial, and have now been banned.
Six of Dr. Seuss’ books – And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer – will be banned from bookstores like Barnes and Noble and eBay due to racist imagery.
To clarify, “racist imagery” means drawings which show certain races of people in a way that is offensive. For example, an artist may draw an Asian person with slanted eyes, buck teeth, chopsticks, and a long braid, as is a common stereotype of Asian (most likely Chinese) people. But, this stereotype is not true almost all the time, and can come across as racist to some.
In Seuss’ case, he did portray Asians in this way, and portrayed African American people in an exaggerated way. In some of his books, he drew Asians with the stereotypes as seen above and drew them like they had a lower social class than white people – the Asians carried the white people in some of his drawings and the white people carried weapons to show intimidation.
Dr. Seuss had a history of racist imagery. Especially during the second world war, he drew art for propaganda to convince people to pay taxes. He also drew caricatures of German and Japanese people, most notably of a crowd of Japanese men in line to receive bombs, which was published after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Additionally, his stories have been racist or offensive to foreigners. One of Seuss’ strips showed a man passing through a store and buying an African American slave, and another said ‘… and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones… But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter”. Another strip showed the differences between a Chinese and Japanese man, which was racist to both.
Some people have argued that Dr. Seuss was a satirist and was simply joking through his art and stories, and his step-daughter has spoken out about his alleged racism and denied it. However, the final choice is up to you: was Dr. Seuss truly racist or not?
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