"From 1941-43, Seuss was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper, PM, and used this highly-influential platform to create propaganda dehumanizing, stereotyping and even vilifying people of color.
Dr. Seuss repeatedly depicted Africans and African-Americans as monkeys. In fact, his cartoons only depict Black people as monkeys. This cartoon he made for “Judge” Magazine in 1929 was up for auction in 2015 for $20,000 and has African American men up for sale with a sign reading: “Take Home A High Grade N*gger For Your Wood Pile.”...
He branded all people of Japanese-descent as anti-American and depicted Japanese and Japanese-Americans as categorically evil... His racism towards Asians was not isolated to his political cartoons. He made statements about it and is quoted by his biographer, Richard H. Minear, as saying, “If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs.” It was even incorporated into his early children’s books. In his first book, And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, he references a “Yellow-faced Chinaman who eats with sticks.”...
Beyond impacting our student’s ability to engage in school, discrimination, fear and loss of safety affects our student’s life trajectories. What message is being sent when we ask them to celebrate a man with a well documented history of reinforcing this same type of hate and division against people of color? How is it shaping their perceptions of what is racially acceptable and normalized? How will it impact their future engagement with reading and books?"
Hm. My parents met him once, weird to think.
It's also so real, I have thoroughly been taught that I have to just accept that someone wouldn't think of me as human and would possibly be abstractly accepting of my violent death, as long as that person has been deemed sufficiently valuable by American society/historians. It's hard to expect anything of important people or the system at large, when you have been taught to accept something so awful.
FB: "The problem with attempting to defend, rationalize, or sweep the racism Dr. Seuss espoused under the rug — is that it condones the very real implications those kind of narratives had (and continue to have) on oppressed groups.
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