• Children, Too, Sing America:Ending Apartheid in and of Children's Literature
• Ellen Butler Donovan (bio) and Laura Dubek (bio)

On March 2, 2021, National Read Across America Day, the estate of Theodor Geisel, known to millions as Dr. Seuss, announced that it would no longer publish six of the best-selling author's books, each of which "portray[s] people in ways that are hurtful and wrong" (Dr. Seuss Enterprises 2021). This announcement touched a cultural nerve, attracting the attention of national media outlets and politicians as well as academics and advocates for anti-racist education and greater diversity in children's books. Articles and op-eds appeared in mainstream publications in and outside the US. Shortly after the announcement, National Public Radio aired a segment on All Things Considered that featured commentary by two English professors: Donald Pease, who holds a position named after Geisel at Dartmouth, and Michelle H. Martin, who teaches children's literature at the University of Washington. Pease used Geisel's biography to contextualize the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease mass-producing racist images, noting that Geisel himself "evolved" with regard to race and thereby effectively countering the idea that the decision constituted a threat to childhood from so-called cancel culture. Martin, the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African [End Page 349] American Children's Picture Books, 1845–2002 (2004), offered a wider historical context for understanding both the racist stereotypes in Dr. Seuss's books and the decision to stop publishing them, pointing out that Geisel wrote for a White audience, his popular books responding to a market dominated by "stiff, humorless" books for children, such as the basal readers Martin remembers from her 1960s childhood (Ulaby 2021). While Martin emphasized the changing landscape for children's books over the last fifty years, with more stories for and about children of color, the publishing industry and the US children's literary tradition remain predominantly and undeniably White.

Four days after the announcement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Congressman Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to read Green Eggs and Ham, tweeting a video of his performance with the message, "I still like Dr. Seuss." While many political pundits recognized the minority leader's stunt as an attempt to deflect attention away from contentious and more serious matters of policy, his scripted performance should also be understood as an insidious example of how White supremacy reconstitutes itself through mass media—in this case via Twitter and books for children. Indeed, McCarthy's viral video, dismissed as political theater, actually underscores the vexed relationship between children's literature and the process of reconstructing White American identity. Since the publication of the New England Primer in the 1680s, US children's literature has functioned pedagogically and with ideological intent, offering readers depictions of "approved" behavior, attitudes, and ideas. Toni Morrison, the most celebrated writer in the African American literary tradition, structured her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in a way that exposes and indicts the racism of this ideological intent: fourteen-year-old Pecola's life plays out within the context of the mid-twentieth-century Dick and Jane basal readers, White master narratives that render Pecola both invisible and irrelevant. Whether with conscious intent or not, when Representative McCarthy tweeted his staged reading, he entered a high-stakes debate about race and representation in children's literature. And by choosing to read a book by Dr. Seuss that did not contain the same derogatory images as those books being withdrawn from the market, he participated in (and, with the full weight of his political office, sanctioned) a centuries-long practice of erasing childhoods other than those that are White and [End Page 350] middle class. The Congressman's proclamation of support for Dr. Seuss veiled a much darker message, however, one that circulated on flyers following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: IT'S OKAY TO BE WHITE.

This latest controversy over Dr. Seuss's work and legacy brings renewed attention to US children's literature as a contested site that reveals the contradictions inherent in our nation's racist history and proclaimed sense of itself. In...

• 儿童也歌唱美国：结束儿童文学中的种族隔离
• 艾伦·巴特勒·多诺万（传记）和劳拉·杜贝克（传记）

2021 年 3 月 2 日，美国全国阅读日，数百万人称为苏斯博士的西奥多·盖塞尔 (Theodor Geisel) 的庄园宣布将不再出版这位畅销作家的六本书，每本书都“描绘[s]人们以有害和错误的方式行事”（苏斯博士企业 2021 年）。这一公告触动了文化神经，引起了国家媒体和政治家以及学者和反种族主义教育和儿童读物多样性倡导者的关注。文章和专栏出现在美国国内外的主流出版物中。宣布后不久，国家公共广播电台播放了一段关于考虑所有事情的片段两位英语教授发表了评论：唐纳德·皮斯（Donald Pease）在达特茅斯（Dartmouth）担任以盖塞尔（Geisel）命名的职位，以及在华盛顿大学教授儿童文学的米歇尔·H·马丁（Michelle H. Martin）。Pease 使用 Geisel 的传记将 Seuss Enterprises 博士停止大规模生产种族主义图片的决定置于背景中，并指出 Geisel 本人在种族方面“进化”，从而有效地反驳了这一决定对所谓的童年构成威胁的观点。取消文化。马丁，《棕金：非洲的里程碑》的作者 [完第 349 页] 美国儿童图画书，1845–2002 年（2004 年），为理解苏斯博士书中的种族主义刻板印象以及停止出版它们的决定提供了更广泛的历史背景，并指出盖塞尔为白人读者写作，他的畅销书回应了由“僵硬、没有幽默感”的儿童读物，例如马丁在 1960 年代童年时记得的基础读者（Ulaby 2021）。尽管马丁强调了过去 50 年来儿童书籍不断变化的格局，有更多关于有色儿童的故事，但出版业和美国儿童文学传统仍然以白人为主，不可否认。

苏斯企业博士宣布四天后，国会议员凯文麦卡锡到众议院阅读《绿鸡蛋和火腿》，在推特上发布了一段他的表演视频，并附有这样的信息：“我仍然喜欢苏斯博士。” 虽然许多政治专家认为少数党领袖的噱头是试图将注意力从有争议和更严重的政策问题上转移开，但他的剧本表演也应该被理解为白人至上如何通过大众媒体重组自身的阴险例子——在这种情况下是通过推特和儿童书籍。事实上，麦卡锡的病毒式视频被斥为政治戏剧，实际上强调了儿童文学与重建美国白人身份的过程之间的棘手关系。在 1680 年代的新英格兰初级读物中，美国儿童文学在教学和意识形态方面发挥了作用，为读者提供了“认可”的行为、态度和想法的描述。非裔美国文学传统中最著名的作家托妮·莫里森（Toni Morrison）创作了她的处女作《最蓝的眼睛》（1970 年），以一种揭露和控诉这种意识形态意图的种族主义的方式：14 岁的佩科拉的生活在 20 世纪中叶迪克和简的基础读者的背景下上演，白人大师的叙述使佩科拉两者看不见的和无关紧要的。无论是否有意，当麦卡锡众议员在推特上发布他的分阶段阅读时，他进入了一场关于儿童文学中种族和代表性的高风险辩论。通过选择阅读苏斯博士的一本书，该书不包含与那些从市场上撤出的书籍相同的贬义形象，他参与了（并且凭借他的政治职位的全部重量，批准了）长达数百年的实践抹去除白人和[完第 350 页]以外的童年中产阶级。国会议员宣布支持苏斯博士的声明掩盖了一个更黑暗的信息，然而，在弗吉尼亚州夏洛茨维尔举行的 2017 年团结右翼集会之后，传单上流传着一个信息：白人没关系。

这场关于苏斯博士的作品和遗产的最新争议重新引起了人们对美国儿童文学的关注，因为它是一个有争议的网站，它揭示了我们国家种族主义历史中固有的矛盾和所宣称的自我意识。在...