Jake Tapper’s ‘Empirically Racist’ Dr. Seuss Nonsense

J ake Tapper went on a tiny Twitter tirade the other day in defense of de-publishing some Dr. Seuss books for being, in a phrase he used several times, “empirically racist.” Tapper strikes me as more reasonable (or at least less unreasonable) than most of the frothing lunatic conspiracist demagogues he works with at CNN, and I suspect (or at least hope) that an argument from reason might have some effect on him, so I’ll start by explaining that “empirical” means pretty much the opposite of what he thinks it means. Throw the word “racist” out there, and people jettison their faculties surprisingly quickly.

Empirical means scientifically observable based on data. Empirical means millimeters and decimal points and test tubes and other stuff from eighth-grade science. It does not mean variable according to opinion or judgment or taste or rapidly changing perceptions. It is objective, not subjective. Determining what is “racist,” on the other hand, varies from person to person, from culture to culture, even from moment to moment: Ten seconds ago, no one realized that these “empirically racist” Dr. Seuss books were in fact racist, just as, 45 seconds ago, no one thought ethnic depictions on The Muppet Show were so horrid as to require trigger warnings or that we should be alarmed by Pepé Le Pew cartoons.

Tapper’s small screed was inspired by the antics of some right-wingers who have taken to leveraging the Dr. Seuss controversy for attention, their disgust epitomized by Kevin McCarthy owning the libs by reading Green Eggs and Ham on the House floor. Since Green Eggs and Ham isn’t (yet!) one of the de-published books, Tapper complains that McCarthy and others are being intellectually dishonest by changing the subject: They’re not defending the least defensible examples of what they’re talking about, because those illustrations are inconvenient to their argument.

Fair point. But left-wing talking heads are guilty of the same thing: ignoring the least defensible examples of what they are talking about because they’re inconvenient to their argument. Indeed, since Dr. Seuss Enterprises didn’t explain exactly which images caused their de-publishing frenzy last week, it’s hard for anyone else to explain their thinking. Why the hell did they cancel McElligott’s Pool? All anyone can find in this book that seems to be in the same universe as racism is a depiction of an Eskimo. Is including cartoons of non-white peoples in itself a racist act? Is the word “Eskimo” (also considered inoffensive until about three minutes ago) itself out of bounds? What gives? What are the rules? What’s the “empirical” basis here? Six books were de-published, but the same four images, in only three of the books, kept being cited in the media, and only one of those images would likely be ruled out of bounds by the average person today.

It has become a commonplace to Tapper and the rest of the left-wing media to conflate “racist” and “racial.” But there is a difference here, and that difference is the element of hatred. Theodor Geisel’s WWII-propaganda cartoons of Japanese troops can fairly be described as racist: There’s hate in them. However, given that the U.S. and Japan were at war, it seems safe to say that mean cartoons were the least salient variety of 1940s hostility. When two cultures are engaged in mass-slaughtering one another, I think we can take it as a given that they’re not thinking kind thoughts.

As for the images in Geisel’s kids’ books, some are clearly outdated. The cartoon most likely to give offense in the six de-published books, from If I Ran the Zoo (1950), depicts goofy creatures from “the African island of Yerka” who look like upright pot-bellied monkeys with rings through their noses. Since many Dr. Seuss characters are non-humans, this could be a way of anthropomorphizing animals in a silly way, but to many contemporary readers it looks more like the reverse: animal-izing humans by making a hateful comparison between black men and monkeys. Certainly it’s the kind of image that a cartoonist would shun today; parents reading the book to children today might skip that page.

The other two images Geisel’s detractors most often cite involve Asian features. Another drawing from If I Ran the Zoo shows a cartoon of three proud-looking Asian men (who “wear their eyes at a slant”) carrying on their heads a cage containing a bird-beast. “Empirically racist”? I see no hatred in this image. It’s a caricature, and caricatures are by their nature unfair, reductive, and disproportionate, but there’s no obvious malice in this one. In To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street — notable both for being the first Dr. Seuss book and for being the only one (as far as I know) whose title refers back to Geisel’s proud hometown of Springfield, Mass., and hence an emblem of regional pride — there is (or was) “a Chinaman who eats with sticks” (yellow skin, traditional Chinese dress, an eye rendered as a slash mark, chopsticks). “Chinaman” became offensive long after the book was written and was replaced in recent editions with “Chinese man,” but the image isn’t clearly hate-driven. A reasonable person might describe it as racist. Another reasonable person might see it as moderately offensive. Another reasonable person might see it as mildly offensive.

This isn’t an empirical question, it’s one of judgment that is likely to vary according to age, culture, education level, and other factors. The mass of water is empirically measurable and will not vary based on your status as a human being, but sensitivity to racism ranges across a spectrum. Indeed, being eager to bring a charge of racism over things such as old cartoons is a kind of status signifier, strongly associated with education. I think Tapper can readily imagine a 70-something working-class grandfather considering the Chinese image to be completely inoffensive.

In my experience, non-college-educated people of all races simply aren’t very sensitive to elite concerns about race; the general rule seems to be that as long as there is harmless or comic intent, racial stereotypes and generalizations are fine. Hard hats don’t have fainting couches. Hypersensitivity to racism extending so far as to cheer on the de-publishing of a book because of a single outdated image exhibits a kind of luxury panic, like worrying that the sushi might not be fresh.

Reasonable people might decide that the level of risk to their children of these cartoons is manageable: Skipping a page is a pretty simple solution. But to Tapper and the rest of the censorial Left, parents can no longer be ideologically trusted to do the right thing. Instead, there must be an all-powerful cultural regime that interlocks activist groups with left-wing media and extends as far as huge Silicon Valley companies such as eBay stopping people from trading in disapproved books, all of these supposedly independent entities working together to roadblock disfavored materials. No, this isn’t book-burning; it’s quite a bit more sophisticated than that.

Kevin McCarthy and others may be guilty of grandstanding by changing the subject from ugly images of Africans to Green Eggs and Ham, but given that no one is clear on what the rules and standards are, neither Tapper nor anyone else can predict just how slippery the slope will get. Tapper mocked a Republican outfit for citing The Cat in the Hat as though it had been canceled.

Hey, relax, no one is de-publishing The Cat in the Hat! Don’t be ridiculous! That’s Tapper’s stance today. But what if tomorrow someone calls Tapper racist for taking this position? My guess is he will do what everyone on the left always does when the word comes up: fold. Any beloved author, any beloved book, film, TV show, image, or thought is in danger of being disappeared from the cultural landscape as soon as any activist group decides it’s racist. And left-wing activist groups have a strong incentive to keep doing this: It leads to publicity, it leads to donations, it leads to the kind of harrumphing on Fox News that is perhaps the central aim of cultural trolls. Because you have to keep putting fuel on the fire, the work of declaring stuff racist can never be complete.

Hoho, they’d never come for The Cat in the Hat? They already are. Let’s look at the reasoning at Vox, one of the most widely read and influential left-of-center sites, the one whose writers keep getting snapped up by the New York Times, sometimes frictionlessly gliding over from obvious activism to allegedly nonpartisan reporting slots. I’m going to provide a lengthy quotation both in the interests of giving full context and to illustrate how a white liberal writer who is at first resistant to the idea gradually brings herself around to the position that, sadly, even though it was written by a liberal who opposed racism, The Cat in the Hat might have to be de-published for the good of society:

In his book-length study Was The Cat in the Hat Black?, English professor Philip Nel notes that the woman in question, Annie Williams, was Black. And Nel argues that Dr. Seuss, who performed in minstrel shows in college, used Williams as the basis for a character whose iconic look would be rooted in the imagery of the American minstrel show and blackface.

“The Cat’s umbrella (which he uses as a cane) and outrageous fashion sense link him to Zip Coon, that foppish ‘northern dandy negro,’” writes Nel. “His bright red floppy tie recalls the polka-dotted ties of blackfaced Fred Astaire in Swing Time (1936) and of blackfaced Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms (1939). His red-and-white-striped hat brings to mind Rooney’s hat in the same film or the hats on the minstrel clowns in the silent picture Off to Bloomingdale Asylum.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that The Cat in the Hat is definitely racist, or that someone has to be racist to read The Cat in the Hat to their kids. (I would, though, suggest that this context makes that plot line in the sequel where the Cat smears ink all over the house and then the kids yell at him to kill the stains kind of uncomfortable, in light of the racial history of the way Black people, dirt, and ink are associated in American pop culture.)

But the example of The Cat in the Hat is illustrative. It shows how a man steeped in racist ideas and imagery could end up reproducing the same imagery in a medium as innocent as a book designed to teach kids to read, all while espousing liberal ideals about tolerance and love for all.

New rules are in effect: Anything that can be dubbed racist will be dubbed racist, even if this requires a breathtakingly tendentious or uncharitable reading. Organizations in whose interest it is to posit that America is deeply racist will promote and inflate these claims. And books will continue to be extinguished in the cultural bonfire. There may be some grandstanding connected to all of this, but it isn’t silly to find it disturbing, even if the Jake Tappers of the world are fine with it.