Seuss, Song of the South, And Why All Of It Should Be Available
There is an inherent value in keeping older "controversial" material in circulation
On March 2nd, Dr Seuss Enterprises abruptly announced the removal of six Dr. Seuss books from publication -- 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. In their statement announcing the change, the company didn’t give much in the way of an explanation as to why
“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.”
The decision seems to stem from a 2017 study evaluating Seuss’ works through an antiracism lens and finding them sorely lacking. The study itself was less than rigorous, even getting key plot points in Seuss stories wrong in order to paint a picture of Seuss’ work as racist, or at least not as antiracist as it should be.
I won’t go into the weeds on this specific controversy -- that’s been done several times already by writers better than I. Instead, I want to talk about another piece of art that was removed from circulation under similar circumstances; the Disney film Song of the South.
For the obligatory libertarian throat clear before going forward -- of course both Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Disney have the right to decide to pull certain works from circulation. Those companies own the intellectual property rights to the works in question and if they no longer want to have those works associated with their brands that is their prerogative. I don’t intend this to be a conversation about the rightness or wrongness of those decisions, or of the topic of intellectual property or copyright; as I said, others have already handled those topics better than I can.
For those not familiar with the film, here’s a quick rundown of Song of the South. The film, which debuted in 1946, was criticized for perpetuating the idea of the “happy slave” (Magical Negro in current parlance). The film did well commercially both in its first and second run -- Disney re-released it in theaters in 1986 -- and won the 1947 Best Original Song Grammy for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The controversy surrounding the film both on its release and in current culture revolves around a crucial misstep Disney made; the studio did not make it clear that the film was set in the Reconstruction-era South, not the antebellum South. That lack of clarification led viewers to assume one of the main characters, Uncle Remus, is a slave and not a sharecropper. While Disney certainly screwed up in not making that distinction clear, the studio had no intent in perpetuating negative racial stereotypes. Still, the idea that Song of the South is an inherently racist film persists, to the point that Disney has refused to offer the film in any form in the US.
Most of the controversy around racist imagery in Seuss’ work is centered around some of the depictions of African and Chinese characters, specifically in If I Ran The Zoo and AndTo Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street. The books, written in 1950 and 1937 respectively, do depict African and Chinese people in ways that certainly wouldn’t make it past a sensitivity reader today. But those books weren’t written today, they were written 71 and 84 years ago when images like that were considered acceptable. That distinction seems to be irrelevant in the current conversation, however.
What ties both of these controversies together is that both are based around a misinterpretation which has led to conclusions that are not supported by the works. Song of the South was not intended to whitewash the horror of slavery, Seuss’ drawings were not meant to promote a racist view of African or Chinese people, yet here we are.
Even if one wants to continue to take the most uncharitable view of Song of the South and Seuss’ works, there is still one good reason to keep them in circulation; educational purposes. There is a narrative in certain circles that we are currently living in the most racist age ever, that no time before was as bad as today. Works like Song of the South and Seuss’ illustrations serve to prove that there was a time when imagery like that was treated much more cavalierly than it would be today. If a studio were to make Song of the South today it would take special care to inform the audience that Uncle Remus is indeed a free man living on a plantation, not a plantation slave. A publisher would never allow images like the ones in If I Ran The Zoo or And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street to be published in one of its books. None of this is due to “wokism” or “the mob” but because as a culture we’ve become more sensitive to how certain races are portrayed in popular culture.
To be able to understand how far we’ve come as a society, one has to be able to see what came before the current moment. Letting children learn about our cultural past, even the parts deemed “harmful” by today’s standards, gives them the opportunity to see the progress that has been made. Who knows, maybe we’ll even learn that children aren’t as emotionally fragile as you’d think and can handle exposure to controversial imagery better than some adults can.