College Literature

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...