Hang on to Your Copies of Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss

“And then they came for Matilda,” Coleman Hughes tweeted. Random House wants to make Roald Dahl’s books “inclusive” by removing “insensitive” language. Miss Trunchbull no longer has a horsey face, just a face. Augustus Gloop, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, isn’t enormously fat anymore, just enormous. Is he still a nincompoop? I always loved that word.

“Even things that are true can be proved,” Oscar Wilde remarked, and this rings in my ears as I page through scholarship on white supremacy and racism in children’s classics—usually where there’s no sign of either.

I feel lucky to have most of my Dr. Seuss collection. I never owned McElligot’s Pool, which can still be found on Amazon for nearly $130, but listened to it on YouTube, and wondered if I’d missed a page. Where was the racism?

In this hilariously rhymed tale, a boy fishing in a pond hopes to land a big one. Undaunted by a naysayer telling him he’ll never catch a thing, the child imagines fish from all over the world finding their way into his pool. Like most Seuss characters of all ethnicities his face is a caricature—as are the faces of the Eskimo fish, swimming along in their furred parkas. Apparently the word “eskimo”—not a racial slur but old-fashioned—offends some Inuit people, or Random House was afraid it would do so.

If I Ran the Zoo is frequently held up as an egregious example of racism. A young boy, Gerald McGrew, dreams of going to faraway places to bring home unusual animals for his zoo, and one those places is “the African island of Yerka,” whose inhabitants have dark skin and topknots—and look every bit as ridiculous as the white French chef sporting his silly mustache on a tightrope, and young Gerald McGrew, whose pop-eyed cutely thoughtful or occasionally smug look is typical Seuss.

In fact, Dr. Seuss’s animals, children, and adults all look absurdly curious, maniacally intense, or gleefully smug. He's an equal opportunity satirist. He caricatures fish: they seem to be wearing mascara and bat their eyelashes. He caricatures “a beast called the Grizzly-Ghastly," perhaps a bear, grabbed by that skinny weakling, Sneelock, in a chokehold. Yes, there's a line about Asians “who wear their eyes at a slant” carrying a cageful of exotic animals to the zoo.  Does that signify hatred or--more likely--"Gee, they look different from me." A childlike observation that could lead a mother or a teacher to talk about different ethnicities and different styles in a friendly, non-racist manner. Could lead an Asian mother to remark on his lack of familiarity with ethnicities other than his own. Could lead to many insights--in a conversation. Those things we rarely have.

 Then there’s Philip Nel, who wrote a whole book proving The Cat in the Hat is based on blackfaced minstrel shows. Which proves something bad, he seems to feel.

A February 2019 article, “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” by Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens, claims that only 2% of Seuss’s characters are not white, that babies show race bias at three to six months, that Dr. Seuss’s World War II anti-Japanese and other caricatures of non-white ethnicities are proof of embedded racism. (Never mind Horton Hears a Who or The Sneetches.) If you really believe all that, there's a great bridge in Brooklyn and it's for sale.

"Inclusive" language means the exclusion of art. Equating grotesquerie and comic caricature with racism is foolish.

 

 

 

 

Florida Flummoxed

Current controversies in Florida—Governor Ron DeSantis’s demolishing of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the State—have left most people I know extremely divided. Those in favor and those against.

They leave me with Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming” ringing in my ears: 

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

By his definition, I am the best and I am the worst. I’ve always hated DEI in the forms directed by Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ijeoma Oluo, Rennie Edo-Lodge, among others; I’ve always shaken my head at the exclusion of a brilliant scholar like Thomas Sowell from any debates I witness among many liberal news outlets, not to mention Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, to list some of the most vocal. A recent Twitter exchange between Hannah-Jones and Coleman Hughes suggests her complete lack of familiarity with Sowell’s work. 

 

I don’t like “teaching” beginning with the premise “the United States is a system of white supremacy.” I’d be fine with: “Is the United States a system of white supremacy? Why or why not?” I don’t like separating students into groups of “oppressed” and “oppressors,” a practice which has increased racism and a maliciously aggrieved atmosphere in many classrooms. Or insisting that one group must be singled out to atone for presumed historic guilt. These ideologies are, however, frequently taught and funded with taxpayer dollars in the millions, a fact exposed by Christopher Rufo, who obtained documents revealing amounts in Florida universities. Cathy Young’s response, that his interpretation of the significance of these facts is misleading and that governmental interference in what ought to be decided from within the universities themselves is certainly a point to consider. Nobody wants a government telling us what to think. But Rufo’s response is that given the amount of money going into DEI bureaucracies, government is already telling us what to think. I’m not so sure Cathy Young is right—Roger Kimball’s 1990 book, Tenured Radicals, rang true to me, someone who went through graduate school as a part-time student from the early eighties to 1991, when I finally finished my dissertation. I saw changes. I saw truly brilliant scholars fail to be able to talk to any other brilliant scholar not absolutely congruent with their political or theoretical framework. They wouldn't say hello to each other in the hall. I saw a department go into receivership. All that was nothing compared to the post-pandemic, post George Floyd’s murder world.

Roger Kimball made sense. Then he voted for Donald Trump. Like Glenn Loury. And I’m thinking, can’t these smart men see the gangster personality oozing from Trump’s pores? Five minutes of watching Trump speak was enough for me. It’s an enormous mistake to underestimate personality and character.

And then here we are with a bill mislabeled “Don’t say gay”—it says nothing of the kind. Watch enough YouTube videos of mothers saying they don’t like graphic textbooks of descriptions of fisting and you may sympathize. African-American history hasn’t been banned. Exactly what’s been banned is public information, recently exposed by Christopher Rufo—the documents are on the net.

Watching current versions of sex and gender instruction in schools, I wonder if children are left any privacy at all. The barrage of information about sexual techniques seems to me to force children to think about sex in particular ideological ways rather than make their own discoveries. Not to mention the policy of not informing parents about a child’s wish to adopt a new gender.

Book-banning is always bad. There are plenty of bad books out there, but the best way to make them desirable is to ban them. One might say the same for DeSantis’s bill. Except: I’ve seen too many children’s books about what “white people” think or say or do, casting all whites as oppressors and all blacks as oppressed. I wouldn’t want a teacher reading my kid those books. I’ve had plenty of time to observe what schoolchildren under Hitler learned about “the Jew” to see the potential for damage—some of my friends’ mothers remember what they learned in elementary school; now they shrug with disbelief and say, “that’s what the teacher said."

The money going into DEI bureaucracies is a problem. The books being read young children (not to mention the drag queens waltzed in to provide diversity training) are a problem. Is banning these things a problem? If my children were young, I’d be afraid of making undesirable notions more desirable. And I’d home-school.

Al Sharpton's Dream

I was greatly moved when the Reverend Al Sharpton invoked Martin Luther King in his eulogy for Tyre Nichols: “In the city where the dreamer laid down and shed his blood, you have the unmitigated gall to beat your brother,” Rev. Sharpton said of the police officers involved. “How dare you.”

His point is not just that Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, or that the men who murdered Nichols are destroying King's legacy. Sharpton made clear that King's dream is the best way to combat divisiveness, police brutality, and racism. To look into the content of a man's character, not at his skin color. The police officers who brutally murdered Tyre Nichols are individual men responsible for their actions; they represented a total breakdown of law and order and a shocking brutality.  They did not behave like human beings or treat Tyre Nichols like a human being. "You thought you threw Dr. King's dream in the pit," Sharpton said to the killers, because they are black. But race was not the point. "What happened to the dream?" he asked. Restore it. "God will do for us what we do for ourselves," said Al Sharpton, indicating that we all have a mountain to climb, and must keep climbing it until we're free of police brutality.

It is noteworthy that Sharpton did not invoke that prophet of victimhood, Ibram X. Kendi or anyone else remotely connected with the so-called anti-racism movement. He pointed us back to Dr. King, where we should have remained all along.