Rockett, 11, and Zoe, 10, just wanted their classmates to know that Dr. Seuss was kind of racist.
Wow! Dr. Seuss books were a childhood favourite of mine, but no longer!
This week’s post features an article from the AngryAsianMan blog that highlights youth resistance against erasures of racist histories in their curriculum. Two incredible siblings, Rockett (11) and Zoe (10) designed these gorgeous posters to educate their classmates and school about the author’s side job as a political cartoonist well known for racist cartoons during the school’s Dr. Seuss week. However, their school didn’t appreciate their intervention and tried to stop them from telling this alternate history.
“While Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel, is best known for enduring, beloved books like The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, he began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist who drew racist political cartoons expressing, among other things, vehement anti-Japanese sentiment. Geisel apparently had absolutely no problem with the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans during World War II, depicting them in caricature as invading hordes and latent traitors loyal to the enemy.”
Luckily, the story doesn’t stop there. Zoe and Rockett’s parents in a brilliant show of intergenerational solidarity wrote back to the school in support of their kids. They explained how popular racist political cartoons like Geisel’s helped fuel the wartime panic and public support of Executive Order 9066 which led to Rockett and Zoe’s great grandparents’ forceful incarceration in US concentration camps among 120 000 other Japanese Americans. Part of their email read:
“This is not an opinion, much like Hitler's anti-Semitism is not an opinion, for Geisel's hatred of Japanese is well documented, and is chronicled in American history books. Unfortunately our family has had a direct impact and has suffered directly from Geisel's cartoons.
We understand it is in your opinion that school is not for this type of "educational" encounter that Rockett attempted to present today. Perhaps trying to educate his fellow classmates with a flyer may have been a little unconventional and has placed you in an uncomfortable position. We respect your opinion and authority of what is deemed appropriate in your classroom, much as I would expect the same in my classroom, and will of course defer to you about what is appropriate. However I do have to say I disagree in principal with your standpoint that "school" is not the appropriate place to disseminate new, or differing ideas.”
You must be wondering, what on earth does this have to do with challenging problematic citation practices?
As mentioned on a previous post, one of Citation Practices Challenge’s intentions is to highlight long standing erasures from dominant knowledges, alongside creative resistance (and there is always radical wonderful resistance) against different forms of historical erasure. What and who we choose to cite and not to cite applies not only to our writing, but to our classrooms and community work too. The school chose to cite Dr. Seuss, while choosing not to cite him as a racist. If it weren’t for Rockett and Zoe’s creative intervention, their classmates would be denied the chance to learn that a figure that they’re taught to celebrate and admire is a racist. Without knowing the full story, how could the students have chosen whether to accept or reject celebrating Dr. Seuss and accepting him as part of their learning?
By creating and sharing these gorgeous posters that showed Dr. Seuss’ racist history, Rockett and Zoe were running critical interventions against their school’s reproduction of the depoliticized narrative of him. Plus, they were intervening with a learning environment that discourages students to resist and reject racist curriculum.
In solidarity with youth-led and intergenerational resistance,
Fi
