When is the last time you saw a minstrel show? Think hard. Not a movie with a minstrel show in it, in context. Not a documentary on minstrel shows. A full live action show where white folks dressed up in costumes, portrayed Africans, often in slave motifs, making stereotypical gestures and language. My guess is you haven't and frankly that is understandable. While black-face continues to pop up now and again and has been part of British TV very recently, though not full accepted, the idea that a theater would put on a minstrel show today is beyond ridiculous. Have they been cancelled? In the 19th century they were all the rage in entertainment and comedy, but today the very notion makes us cringe. Certain types of entertainment have a time and frankly then they don't.
So this week, after years of concern, Seuss Enterprises has made the decision not to continue publication of some of works of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. In a statement they wrote:
Today, on Dr. Seuss’s Birthday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises celebrates reading and also our mission of supporting all children and families with messages of hope, inspiration, inclusion, and friendship.
We are committed to action. To that end, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That 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. These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.
Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.
Of course this has the right wing noise machine and their audiences losing their minds. Many voices on the right and a few on the left started screaming about book banning, cancel culture and even book burning. Watching elected officials suggest that some how this is government overreach when the government wasn't involved at all. I don't understand how if someone who owns the rights of a piece of art, who chooses not to share it any longer is a ban. Dr. Seuss Enterprises has taken this seriously and made a wise decision to put on the shelf a historical expression based on how the culture saw people. Seuss was a product of his time, and over time changed the way he saw his own work. As the noise continues and we hear how much these hypocrites say they learned so much from Dr. Seuss the only thing I can think of that they learned was how to be like Sylvester McMonkey McBean and con the crowd. It wasn't that long ago that the same voices were calling Seuss works left wing propaganda as people read The Lorax as part of educating on environmentalism. So they were ready to cancel Seuss then I guess.
But that is par of the course for these people. We have watched these propagandists call for boycotts of Starbucks, Keruig, Target, and many others over social issues. There are even members of Congress wanting to host a hearing on cancel culture. The big worry is the private internet companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have deplatformed voices promoting the lie of election fraud that drove the attack on Capital on January 6th. The idea is again that somehow this private company doesn't have the right to decide what they promote. Funny story however about these people. The recent Conservative Political Action Conference where many of the people crying about the cancel culture had a theme: UnCancel America. One of the speakers they were promoting was a rapper and internet bigot Young Pharaoh as a speaker until it was pointed out that he is a raging anti-Semite and Qanon conspiracy supporter. So they canceled him. Literally. Apparently protecting your brand is important to CPAC but shouldn't be to Seuss Enterprises.
The fact is there have always been changes on what is culturally appropriate. What worked in mid-20th century for entertainment meets a very different audience in early 21st. We have a long history of what we are comfort with in public and what we find offensive. That history has almost often been driven by conservative advocates. While we hear about what some call political correctness today, the actual calls for using government to impose restrictions or force certain requirements have come from conservatives. We can see this historically in two children's books about rabbits getting married. In the play Alabama Story a state politician wanted to fire a librarian who didn't remove a book with a black and a white rabbit getting married in the Jim Crowe era. This play, based on a true story, showed how what some are calling cancel culture today might actually work. In the satirical book A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, the author imagines the then Vice-President Pence's rabbit, the star of an earlier book, was gay and getting married. Many of the same commentators worried about the action of Seuss Enterprises were ready to trash this book and it has been on the list of the most banned books from schools and public libraries since it was published. Of course we bought a copy.
I am not a fan of censorship, I have fought book banning by government agencies for decades. But that is not what is happening here. We know our history is full of many images and ideas that are hurtful to people who didn't have a voice when they were created. Our cultural myopia allowed for these hurtful expressions to thrive in public spaces and now we question whether they should still be promoted. They won't go away. We know this because in Germany promoting or showing Nazi imagery is illegal, yet all German school children learn of the horrors of that era. We also know about minstrel shows and many understand why black face is wrong, even if we don't produce or encourage either. We don't want the government banning things and that is not what is happening with these Dr. Seuss books. However we don't want to promote hurtful things. So in the words of a wise but complicated man "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not” Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to take the words of their namesake to heart. We should be thanking them and we don't need those books they will no longer publish when we can learn so much from his later works. However I caution them, in the story of the Sneetches, McBean is the bad guy.
