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.