President Biden raised his eyebrows earlier this month when he erased Dr. Seuss from “Read Across America Day,” the annual celebration of reading – but the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library began canceling the legendary children’s author in 2017.
That year, Katie Ishizuka wrote a 43-page study entitled “Rethinking Dr. Seuss for NEA Read Across America: Racism Within Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books & The Case for Centering Diverse Books”, in which the content of 50 of the Seuss most popular books have been analyzed.
Ishizuka was a co-founder of the Conscious Kid Social Justice Library, a subscription service that sends its subscribers monthly shipments of titles featuring multicultural characters, and her report was an early indicator that progressives would seek to remove the beloved children’s author from wide circulation.
Ishizuka wrote that black children may feel uncomfortable about going to school on Read Across America Day because of their ties to Dr. Seuss. She explained that, as the famous children’s author had a history of “anti-black and anti-Japanese caricature drawing and political ads” that most people were unaware of, she wanted to dive into her books and see if they, too, were problematic.
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Ishizuka found that 98% of the characters in Dr. Seuss’ books are White, while only 45 of the 2,240 human characters are not White. All 45, she said, “are portrayed in a racist manner.”
“Of the 45 colored characters, 2 are ‘Africans’, 14 are ‘Asians’ and 29 are ‘turban’ characters who are sometimes attributed to an ethnicity, but are generally from an unknown country or race,” wrote Ishizuka, adding that the two African characters are “described as monkeys”.
Of the 14 “Asian” characters in Seuss’ books, Ishizuka found that “11 … are wearing stereotyped and conical ‘rice hats'”.
“The three (and only) ‘Asian’ characters who are not seen wearing ‘rice hats’, carry an animal in a large cage on top of their heads. [sic] male child holding a gun, standing on top of the animals’ cage being balanced on top of their heads, “she wrote.
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Ishizuka also noted that many of the characters wearing turbans are also “riding exotic animals” and usually wear slippers with curved toes.
“These findings categorically refute the argument that Dr. Seuss’s children’s books themselves are not racist. In addition to centering and maintaining whiteness [sic], they present subservient, dehumanizing, exotipating and stereotyped caricatures of people of color, “wrote Ishizuka.
Ishizuka stated that “exposing children to books that center on whiteness [sic] and portraying people of color in racist, inhuman, exotifying, subservient and stereotyped caricatures, has the ability to “make children think” whiteness [sic] it is central and dominant, “” people of color are peripheral and subordinate “”, people of color are relevant only as a ‘support’ for, or ‘another exotic’ of whites [sic] narrative “and” people of color are subhuman and have the same status and / or appearance as animals. “
She highlighted Seuss’ most famous book, “The Cat in the Hat”, writing that the cat “mimics the role of blackface artists in minstrel shows” because her “goal is to entertain and perform ‘tricks’ for whites [sic] kids.”
Ishizuka went on to analyze several other Dr. Seuss books and concluded that it was “time to reconsider” whether the author should be celebrated.
In 2019, Ihsikuza and Ramón Stephens co-authored an article entitled The cat is out of the bag: orientalism, anti-blackness and white supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. “
The follow-up study was published in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and concluded: “Every time someone dresses up as ‘O Gato do Chapéu’, anti-Negro racism and cultural appropriation are reinforced, and the legacy of the black face and minstrel lives. “
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Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that preserves and protects the author’s legacy, announced this month that he would stop publishing six Seuss books that “portray people in ways that are harmful and wrong”.
The company said copies of “And think 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 no longer be published as of March 2, which was the birthday of Seuss and the National Read Across America Day.
Rémy Numa and Audrey Conklin of Fox News contributed to this report.