Is Dr Suess Racist?

In 2021, the Dr Suess publishing house, administrated by Dr Suess's family decided to withdraw 6 books. These books were withdrawn because they ‘portray people in a way which is hurtful and wrong.’

There was a lot of conversation surrounding this withdrawal from ‘too woke’ to ‘Dr Suess is racist’ to ‘this isn’t even racist’ to ‘celebrating the company for this choice’.

The 6 books which were withdrawn were ‘If I Ran the Zoo’, ‘On Beyond Zebra’, ‘McElligot’s Pool’, ‘And to Think I saw it on Mulberry Street’, ‘Scrambled Eggs Super’, and ‘The Cat’s Quizzler’.

The ‘hurtful and wrong’ images in Dr Suess’s books’ portrayed disturbing, racist, stereotypical images of Black, Asian and Arab people. To me, these images were disturbing as they highlighted the exotic, beautiful difference between people as a point of amusement. In other words, he exaggerated people's differences or showed people's differences to make them humorous and funny.

Dr Suess painted most of my childhood with his whimsical and magical architecture, creatures and characters. He is the reason I care for the environment, the Lorax, always on my mind. His books had so much life in them, you could read the same one over and over and over again and then rap out the lines. He painted most of our childhood and to find out he was racist wasn't the best.

After further research, I found historian, Richard Minear whose research shows that Dr Suess promoted anti-racist themes, he was pro-white-black relations and against anti-semitism. But, being ignorant of some of the blatant racism is wrong, I will be showing you some of the racist cartoons produced by Dr Suess.

Putting this into perspective:

Dr. Suess is an artist from 1950-60s and we still read his work today because of the utter beauty of it. In my opinion, just like many, Dr Suess was a product of a racist society and this shaped his imagination, this did affect and hurt many people. I do believe he did not know he was being racist when he produced these works.

What I can say for sure is the Dr Suess production company is to be celebrated. They made the decision to discontinue these books on their own as they did not want these hurtful images to be a part of their brand and company, kudos to them.

Should we still let children read his works?

You aren’t born racist, you're taught to be racist. It’s very important to check what we let children learn. Dr Suess’s work is truly different from anything I’ve ever seen and its happiness should be passed down from generation to generation. Children should be allowed to read his work and this is only because the company, itself made the decision to make sure children do not intake racism. So, I believe Dr Suess and his work should still be celebrated as long as his work keeps us alive and we can keep his work alive.