Rhymes, Racism, and Remorse: Dr. Seuss the Raging Racist?

 This week, I want to stray away from something more popular and trending in the media and talk about something we all grew up on, and that is Dr.Seuss. It wouldn't be me if I didn't ruin another aspect of your childhood, but let's get into the guy who made some of our favorite books to read as kids. 

While some may already know that Dr.Seuss is not a good person, as stated, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) had an affair while married to his first wife, Helen Palmer while she suffered with the decline of her health and later took her own life due to her condition with polio her note left behind also implied that due to Theodor's infideleity and her own failure with her health it contributed to the decision of her taking her life. 

While we will never know Theodor's exact reaction to this moment, it must be known that he did end up marrying the lady with whom he had cheated on Helen a year after Helen's death. They remained together until his death. While this doesn't add much to Seuss being a racist, there is nothing wrong with stirring the pot before we add the ingredients, because cheating was not Seuss's biggest scandal. 

It is barely talked about when it comes to Dr.Seuss racist depictions of Black, Indigenous, Asian, Arabm and other people of color. During World War II, Seuss drew cartoons that used harmful stereotypes espically when it came to asian people. During the time period of the Japanese incarceration, Seuss had invented a Japanese-like daughter named Chrysantheum-Pearl, who would appear on Christmas Cards. Poet Monica Youn has a series of poems that really take a stab at Seuss's anti-Asian sentiment, which went along with infatuation and xenophobia. 

The racist depictions really became viral when Dr.Seuss Enterprises announced it would stop publishing six different books because they portrayed people in hurtful and wrong ways. For instance, the anti-black caricature of the inhabitants of an African island in the story "If I Ran the Zoo" is one of the books that would also get discontinued during that time. 

During the political climate of World War II, Dr.Seuss used his platform to get political and denounce Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the America First isolationist movement, and he was one of the first to use his platform to depict this. Even the Cat in the Hat was based on blackface performances, and the white gloves, along with the floppy tie and slick persona, are a direct correlation with minstrelsy (the form of entertainment associated with minstrel shows, featuring songs, dances, and formulaic comic routines based on stereotyped depictions of black Americans and typically performed by white actors with blackened faces). The inspiration for the Cat's Look was based on a Black Woman named Annie Williams, who was an elevator operator at one of Seuss's offices. Even in the Mulberry Street books before they were pulled, Seuss went back to edit them and change a character's skin tone and remove a pigtail, proving he was aware of the shifting cultural tide. 

We often want our childhood icons to be unproblematic and whimsical just like their work, but Dr Seusss was a man of deep contradictions. He was a great writer, but leaned into cruel stereotypes that hurt POC we don't have to cancel these people; we must stop being ignorant when we look at these stories. Dr. Seuss taught us that "a person's a person, no matter how small," but it clearly took him a lifetime to learn how to apply that logic to everyone.