An illustration shows an Asian man with bright yellow skin, slanted eyes, a ponytail and a conical hat, holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice over the words “a Chinese man eating with kindling”. Another shows three Asian men in wooden sandals carrying a bamboo cage on their heads with a white boy wielding a gun perched on top, next to the rhyme: “I am going to hunt in the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant / With helpers who all use their slanted eyes. “
The drawings are of “And to think I saw on Mulberry Street” and “If I ran the zoo”, two of the six books by Dr. Seuss that the company responsible for the author’s work announced last week will no longer be published because of his racist images, some of which include stereotyped portraits of Asians.
Although Seuss’s art has been around for decades – “Mulberry Street”, his first children’s book, was published more than 80 years ago – widespread criticism of his work is relatively recent. Karen Ishizuka, chief curator of the American Japanese National Museum in Los Angeles, said Dr. Seuss’ books have managed to prevent this racism for a long time, in part because of the persistence of anti-Asian racism in the United States since the 1800s.
“Undoubtedly, the longstanding prevalence of racist Asian images within the most widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the United States contributed to Dr. Seuss’ late response to racism,” Ishizuka told NBC Asian America. “Generations of Americans grew up with representations of Asians ranging from the grotesque to the comic. Especially when protected by Seuss’ rhyming verses, his racist representations, already normalized in American society, are playfully presented as if they were innocuous ”.
Dr. Seuss ended up editing the image of “Mulberry Street” in 1978, more than 40 years after it was first published, removing the yellow pigment from the Asian man’s skin, as well as the pigtail, and changing “Chinaman” to “Chinese man.” But the character’s slanted eyes remained.
His racism was not limited to children’s books. Dr. Seuss, the pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel (who died in 1991, at 87), also perpetuated harmful Asian stereotypes in a series of political cartoons. From 1941 to 1943, he published more than 400 cartoons for the New York newspaper “PM”, many of which exhibited anti-Japanese racism during World War II.
One of his most infamous political cartoons suggested that Japanese Americans were a threat to the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Titled “Waiting for the House Sign…”, the cartoon depicts countless characters with the same drawn eyes and glasses – who were supposed to be Japanese-Americans – marching along the West Coast and waiting to buy TNT at a store called “Honorable 5th Column. “The cartoon was published on February 13, 1942 – just six days before President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of more than 110,000 individuals of Japanese descent.
Some of Dr. Seuss’ other political cartoons during that time use the slander “Jap”, portray the Japanese as animals, and include captions that replace the letter R with the letter L to mock the way the Japanese speak.
Ishizuka is working on developing a new central exhibition for the museum that she hopes will bring more attention to Dr. Seuss’ political cartoons, featuring original drawings from the University of California, San Diego library – including “Waiting for the Signal From Home. .. ”
“It is important to draw attention to the racist images in Dr. Seuss’ cartoons and children’s books because they are almost treacherous,” she said. “The harm they cause is more difficult to identify than when someone calls you ‘Japanese’ in the face. It is more difficult to fight. “
Philip Nel, a scholar of children’s literature and an English professor at Kansas State University, said that another reason why Dr. Seuss’s calculation took so long is that people have excused his racism, especially the anti-Japanese propaganda he created during the World War II, as a reflection of the time when he lived. But Nel, author of several books, including “Was the cat in the hat black? The hidden racism of children’s literature and the need for different books ”, said that this explanation cannot be sustained.
“The ‘man of his time’ narrative is not a big argument because making that statement is deeply unhistorical,” said Nel. “All people at all times do not think the same way. There were many white Americans at that time who were not spreading the rhetoric that he was. “
Nel said that Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ decision to stop publishing the books – which in addition to “Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo”, also include “McElligot’s Pool”, “On Beyond Zebra!”, “Scrambled Eggs Super! ”And“ The Cat’s Quizzer ”- is due to the long pressure for several books in the United States, as well as recent movements for racial and social justice.
“This is the culmination of decades of work defending diverse works and against books that caricatured people of color,” said Nel. “The Black Lives Matter movement, I think, also brought up the need for several books for young readers. People remember that a place where justice takes place is through representation – recognizing positive examples and citing negative ones. “
Dr. Seuss’ image as a children’s literary icon also delayed the assessment of his racism. “He is a symbol of American childhood,” said Leslie Ito, a mother of two in Southern California.
In 2017, Ito’s sons, Rockett and Zoe, who were 11 and 10 at the time, created and distributed leaflets to their classrooms on Read Across America Day – which was founded by the National Education Association to coincide with Dr’s birthday. Seuss – to educate peers about Dr. Seuss’ racist work.
“Since the children started elementary school, my husband and I decided that it was important to teach them about the dark side of Dr. Seuss,” said Ito of his sons, who are Chinese and Japanese Americans. “We did this every year around Read Across America Day, and one year the children came up with the idea to create a pamphlet, spontaneously.
The children returned home that day telling their parents that they got in trouble and had their pamphlets confiscated. That night, Ito and her husband received an e-mail from the school saying that the pamphlets were inappropriate.
In recent years, Read Across America Day has made an effort to distance itself from Dr. Seuss.
Although Ito said she understands the hesitation in criticizing Dr. Seuss, she is proud that her children have contributed to the current recognition of Seuss’ past.
“When I used to use Google ‘Dr. Seuss and racism, “our story would appear first for a few years, but now it is completely buried under countless stories,” said Ito. “It excites me because it shows that more people than Rockett and Zoe care about this problem.”