Lessons from the Dr. Seuss Cancelation

Here is what I don't see a lot of people saying in response to the Dr. Seuss books that the publisher will no longer be making. Theodore Geisel was a very progressive, liberal-minded person, anti-racist in the most literal sense of that term. Yet he portrayed people in ways that we today recognize to be stereotypical and somewhat offensive. People have been calling him a racist for years, when his views were anything but. How could the author of the Sneetches, an explicitly anti-racist story in the literal sense of that term, be counted as a racist just because he had absorbed some of the stereotypical imagery of his day and brought it out in his depictions of people from around the world when wanting to expose children to multi-cultural stuff and to think more globally?

It nicely illustrates two competing conceptions of what counts as racism, and it also speaks to how there might actually be plenty of racially problematic things that aren't racist in the classic sense of the term. I intend to explore these different notions of what counts as racism in more depth in future posts, along with reasons to favor or reject some of those definitions. I think it's a more complex issue than many people recognize, but I also have a clear view.

I don't think we have good grounds for switching to the new definitions of racism as purely systemic or as power + prejudice. I have moral objections to those definitions. That's not the line I would draw, however, between what is reasonable and what is beyond the pale. The line I would insist on is that those who use those definitions need to make more careful distinctions than they often do. And those who don't use those conceptions need to recognize that sometimes stuff that isn't racist (on the classic definition) can still be racially problematic. Too many people on both sides of that dispute refuse to make such moves, though. The case of Dr. Seuss illustrates the moral importance of doing so.