It also makes space, literally and figuratively, for new texts by diverse authors featuring diverse characters that provide a fuller picture of the world that better reflects the rich variety of people, experiences and perspectives it has to offer. With careful contextualization, these historical materials can help document and teach people about the realities of racism that are so often belittled or denied. Retiring racist texts from children’s literature is a crucial step in interrupting the racist legacies that continue to hurt and divide us. These realities accumulate across people’s lifetimes in ways that devalue us all because they perpetuate unconscious and conscious racism and inequality.
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That they contribute to assumptions that translate into discrimination in hiring, renting, selling, lending, treating, teaching and policing in ways that are hugely consequential for all of us.Ĭaillou cancelled by PBS: Kids' TV is now more diverse, but must do better The research shows that images hurt people. There is a lot of research that has examined the impact of the overwhelmingly negative representations of racialized people in popular culture. No children should see racism as something that is normal or funny. While abhorrent, these texts, memorabilia and objects can be useful. In my classes on African history, I carefully use racist objects and texts to help teach students about histories of anti-Black racism. I have made many donations to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, including some family heirloom photographs of one of my ancestors performing in vaudeville in blackface. I regularly take racist materials out of general circulation - through yard sales, used book stores, discount stores like Dollarama and in tourist shops - so they might be used in research and teaching. It is time to retire racist representations. Seuss Enterprises revisit their policies to ensure they are not perpetuating old-fashioned or harmful practices. Protests are organized, movements are mobilized. Nowadays, parents and students object to racist texts used in class, people contact the media, political leaders, HR departments and investigatory commissions to report incidents of racism.
But it shouldn’t be shrugged off - especially by white people who are not in a position to make such determinations. There are many ways that racism can and should be tackled that don’t result in the erasure of history.
His earlier work also appears in scholarship on histories of racism, the Second World War and children’s literature, which would be a great place for the images and text from these six books as well. Some of Geisel’s earlier work was even more explicitly racist than the titles in question, but hasn’t been erased or destroyed and can be found in museums around the world. Scholars of racism, like myself, can draw on these images and use them to better understand the past. Seuss books are not in danger of being lost forever, but recategorized as evidence of outdated attitudes grounded in racial denigration and stereotyping that no longer have a place in popular culture. Trouillot illustrates this through highlighting the Haitian revolution: the possibility of Black slaves successfully revolting against their white colonizers was so inconceivable within the western ideology of white supremacy that it was effectively written out of history.
In historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s foundational book Silencing the Past, he examines the relationship between history, power and silence to explore the ways that certain experiences, historical actors and events are kept out of archival collections and the historical knowledge they help construct.
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“Don’t erase history!” people often cry, as if history itself wasn’t full of erasures from the beginning. Seuss books, these moral panics and culture wars are often rooted in a false premise that anything from the past comes from a pure and total point of origin, in other words, that representations of confederate soldiers tell a “true,” authentic and complete story that is neutral and objective. Whether focused on removing confederate and colonial statues, or retiring a small handful of Dr. (Shutterstock) History is not neutralĮven in our current context of rapidly improving technology, archives and museums must constantly make tough decisions about what to keep, what to refuse or even remove - this often causes controversy. Seuss BookBench sculpture in London, U.K.
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