Happy memories are just not enough

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2021 (1816 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has announced it will no longer be publishing six Dr. Seuss titles because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

There was some uproar about this. I saw many social-media posts and comments from people who thought this move by the publisher was taking things too far, and that the world has become too sensitive. Many people have a connection to Dr. Seuss because so many of us grew up with his whimsical stories and nonsensical rhymes. His work is etched into our childhood and associated to some of our greatest moments. I don’t remember a Christmas without the Grinch, and I can’t foresee ever having one, to be honest. So, I understand why people are upset. They feel like something is being taken from them.

However, warm memories and not being affected or offended personally by something isn’t enough to make it good or reason for it to withstand the test of time and societal change. Charles M. Blow from the New York Times wrote an opinion piece on the topic headlined, Six Seuss books bore bias. He begins his piece by pointing out that as a Black child in the United States, he was led to believe that Blackness was inferior. It was through toys, cartoons, children’s shows and books that he and other children had been trained and acculturated to hate themselves.

I felt those words profoundly.

Growing up as a brown-skinned Indigenous child, I had this deep-seated shame and self-loathing that I can remember from an early age. I didn’t understand it, and I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started or where it even came from, but from as far back as I can remember, that shame was there — it was a part of me. Perhaps it was learned. Perhaps it was inherited. Maybe both. I don’t know.

I grew up disconnected from my culture, but always reminded of who I was and of who I wasn’t. People who looked like me were never the star of the show or the main character of the story. If we were even featured at all, we were the sidekick, the villain or a parody. Most of the dolls I had growing up had blond hair and pale skin that I wished for so badly.

Representation matters.

Our good ol’ days can still be good. Nobody is trying to cancel Dr. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. In fact, Dr. Seuss is still one of the top-grossing children’s authors of all time, even 30 years after his death. A number of his books still rank as top sellers, and his empire pulled in US$33 million before taxes in 2020, Forbes reported.

We can’t predict what Geisel himself would say about these changes. However, Geisel’s great-nephew Ted Owens told the BBC in 2019 that the author, who started his career as a wartime political cartoonist, would probably find the criticism of his anti-Japanese wartime cartoons (and perhaps the depiction in the books that are being taken out of print) legitimate.

Owens stated Geisel told him things were done a certain way back then, and he tended to adapt to them, but that he was not at all proud of those (cartoons) later in life.

The world around us is a different place than it was back then, and we need to change with it. Things are far from perfect, or even good for a lot of people, but the only way we are ever going to get to a better place and evolve is if we look at the things that hurt people and try to understand and learn from them.

If we look back at our own life and experiences, it’s glaringly obvious how much has changed and how things continue to move forward, whether we’re ready for them to or not. Even our views of the past will change because we have access to more information and other pieces of a bigger story.

Seuss may have said it best in The Lorax: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyACook