10/08/2017
A Trump-hating librarian recently refused a gift of Dr. Seuss books from First Lady Melania Trump for, among other reasons, the belief that Dr. Seuss’s books were "Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,.. I see from Ann Althouse’s blog that a mural containing a detail from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is being Memory Holed for its picture of "a Chinese boy Who eats with sticks".
The Chicago Tribune says:
Following the uproar, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which oversees the author’s estate, said it would replace the mural with another image depicting another of Dr. Seuss' stories.Althouse asks " Why didn’t they figure this out as they were designing the mural?" For all I know, they were trying to achieve diversity."This is what Dr. Seuss would have wanted us to do," according to a statement. "His later books, like 'The Sneetches' and 'Horton Hears a Who,' showed a great respect for fairness and diversity. Dr. Seuss would have loved to be a part of this dialogue for change. In fact, Ted Geisel himself said, 'It’s not how you start that counts. It’s what you are at the finish.'"..
Here’s the actual detail:
RACIST ASS, DR. SEUSS! From "And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street." pic.twitter.com/fWOfcFjFm2
— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) January 25, 2015
That’s posted by an Asian living in 21st Century Queens. Here’s a picture of some Chinese people on a New York street some years before the Dr. Seuss book, showing what they actually looked like:
Here’s an earlier article from Broadly, a Vice.com feminist site, about Dr. Seuss as a "racist" against "Asians".
During the war, Dr. Seuss was an open advocate for Japanese internment, and he frequently published cartoons featuring Asian Americans as buck-toothed and slanty-eyed threats to American freedom. Later, as an apology, he would dedicate Horton Hears a Who to Mitsugi Nakamura, a university professor and "great friend" he met on a post-war trip to Kyoto. During this six-week visit, Seuss collected Japanese children’s drawings of the American occupation for Life magazine, but was ultimately dissatisfied with the way the collection was presented in print. "They raped the article," Dr. Seuss explained, citing the pro-Chinese bias of editor Henry Luce. It was not until 1978 that Geisel would agree to allow a throwaway joke about a "Chinaman" to be rephrased as "Chinese boy" in the text of Mulberry Street. The illustration, featuring a caricature of an Asian man with a long braid and conical hat eating rice with chopsticks, remains intact.I would argue that the author of that has no idea of what was going on in twentieth-century American or Asian history — Dr. Seuss’s anti-Japanese work was done during a bloody war with Japan, and he started it before Pearl Harbor, because he objected to the Japanese invading all those other Asian countries. (See "Rape of Nanking" and "Japanese Atrocities".) But the whole point of Broadly’s "You Know Who Sucked?" series is to attack America’s white past, in stories like this:Dr. Seuss Was a Philandering Bigot Twice a month, our column You Know Who Sucked? explores a beloved historical figure who was actually an ***hole. This week, we remember the rhyming racist philanderer Dr. Seuss.
by Jamie Lauren Keiles
Broadly, August 12, 2015
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.