Dr. Seuss Enterprises is not a political entity. It holds the licenses for its namesake’s more than sixty books—it licensed everything from “Seussical: The Musical” to Jim Carrey’s “Grinch”—which means it is effectively in the business of operating a mint. Of course, these two enterprises—money minting and politics—can sometimes coincide. On March 2nd, Theodore Seuss Geisel’s birthday, the company announced that six books from its catalogue would no longer be published, because they included depictions, usually of nonwhite characters, that were “hateful and wrong.” The statement was unsigned and stipulated that the decision had been made after consultation with “a panel of experts, including educators.”
Shortly after reading about this, I pulled our household Seuss anthology, which contains two of the retracted stories, from my kindergarten-aged son’s shelf. In one, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” I suspected I knew what the offending image would be: a small drawing, over the verse line “A Chinese man eating with sticks,” of an identifiably Asian man in a conical hat running while holding chopsticks over a small bowl. (I later learned that this was not the original image: by the late seventies, Geisel had redrawn the figure to make him less stereotypical.) The problem with the other story, “McElligot’s Pool,” which features a boy with a fishing rod imagining some fanciful creatures he might catch, was harder to find. In a drawing of fish wearing furry-hooded parkas departing an iceberg (“Some Eskimo Fish / From beyond Hudson Bay / Might decide to swim down; / Might be headed this way!”), a smiling man dressed in fur stood outside an igloo, holding a spear.
It was clear why Dr. Seuss Enterprises had retracted the books but not what most immediately had caused it to do so. In 2017, the company had removed a mural from a Dr. Seuss museum in Massachusetts, after complaints that it featured the “Mulberry Street” illustration. That same year, Philip Nel, an English professor at Kansas State University, published a book called “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?,” which argued that the character had roots in minstrelsy shows. There had been a pair of critical papers in academic journals (one was called “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books”), but there were no reports of any vigorous movement to cancel Dr. Seuss. The criticisms of cancel culture tend to describe a politically correct mob, built around an angry consensus. But there was no mob. The Seussers had acted before it could form. Nel told the Times, “They may be motivated by the fact that racism is bad for the brand, or they may be motivated by a deeper sense of racial justice.” Maybe one more than the other.
When politicians or commentators talk about “cancel culture,” they are typically speaking of a fear that even ordinary people who express ideas that are politically incorrect will be publicly shamed—that social media has enabled a universal speech surveillance, and that people and institutions are now self-policing, out of fear of it. The response to the Seuss news, as with any incident that plausibly falls under the banner of cancel culture, was intense, with conservatives, as usual, seeming most outraged. Senator Ted Cruz implied that the Seuss episode had been part of a coördinated program of cancellation, tweeting, “Who knew Joe Biden was such a great book seller.” The Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that it was “mildly creepy” that the Seuss group had pulled the books but “much creepier that so few people notionally in the free-expression business, so few liberal journalists and critics, seemed troubled by the move.” In fact, I found it hard to get too worked up about the possibility that a tenth of the readily available Seuss catalogue will be a little harder to find. What made it interesting was that it reflected a pattern within what conservatives call cancel culture, in which liberal élites struggle with how deeply to identify with the activist point of view about structural racism, which many of them began to embrace in the Trump era. To Dr. Seuss Enterprises, it might have seemed possible that a progressive mob was waiting, ready to turn on “McElligot’s Pool” and “Mulberry Street.” But it is also possible—to me, it seems likely—that there was no such consensus at all.
I covered the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary and found that its signal characteristic was that the candidates spoke as few others had, on many topics but especially on racial ones. Even milquetoast candidates like Pete Buttigieg spoke earnestly (if in his case also defensively, having failed to connect with Black voters) about the necessity of dismantling systemic racism. Bernie Sanders’s rallies sometimes began with a blessing from indigenous people. Nearly all the candidates spoke of “Black and brown communities”—the “brown” was new in a context like this, and it defined Mexican-American or Filipino-American communities not by their own heritage or experience but by their relationship to whiteness. Democratic Presidential candidates often adopted activist language in even more casual ways: Elizabeth Warren described her intention to “lift up the voices” of marginalized communities. This was striking coming from a powerful senator. Activists “lift up the voices” of the marginalized. Senators (and Presidents) are usually in a different business, the allocation of power. They don’t lift up voices; they decide whether to fund wars, and whether a line cook at McDonald’s should make eleven or fifteen dollars per hour. Democratic politicians’ connection with the cause of racial justice strengthened throughout the Trump era—an expression of their horror at a President they openly described as white supremacist or racist. It strengthened further during the spring protests over the police murder of George Floyd. In June, Nancy Pelosi knelt in the Capitol wearing a kente-cloth stole, an idea that had come from the Congressional Black Caucus. Still, the choice made you wonder how closely she was listening, and how much of this was for show.
In cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis, these kinds of progressive ideas are often associated with the political opposition to gentrification. But they may actually share some of the ethos of gentrification, in that they aspire to wash away a complicated past and replace it with one that is beyond rebuke. Such ideas may also be held, in large part, by gentrifiers: college-educated white Democrats are now more progressive on many racial issues than Black or Hispanic voters, as Matthew Yglesias and other commentators have pointed out. (There’s an echo of this progressive desire to wipe the slate clean in a proposal by Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a New York City mayoral contender, and a Black Brooklyn native himself, to revive the borough’s “agrarian economy.” Brooklyn!)
No one deserves to have their name on a school in perpetuity, and little violence is done by erasing it, but when I went through the full list of forty-four names it seemed to me to be dominated by historical figures who had done many admirable things and some objectionable ones. The stumbling efforts in Minneapolis and San Francisco suggest that even the people who most sincerely believe in dismantling white supremacy do not really know how to do so. At least not yet.
Senators and Cabinet officials, at least, have the power to attempt broad social remedies: to raise the minimum wage, to address the racial wealth gap by issuing “baby bonds,” as Senator Cory Booker has long proposed. Change is harder for the many others—not “élites,” but just people with responsibilities—who might run a church, or a school, or a business. You have to balance the budget, and plan the retreat, and fire the person who won’t show up on time, and then you have to work to dismantle white supremacy. How, exactly? Most liberals can agree on the ends of a movement for racial justice. But what are the means—what would be sufficient? The uncertainty characterizes much of progressivism right now, at the outset of the Biden Administration. Plenty of people are stuck in it.
Last month, the Times columnist Michael Powell published a story that quickly entered the cancel culture canon, about an incident at Smith College in the summer of 2018, in which a school employee called campus police to report that someone had remained in a lounge adjacent to the cafeteria after lunch service had ended (the dorm was otherwise closed for the summer). A security officer soon arrived and recognized the person, a Black sophomore named Oumou Kanoute, as a student. They had a brief conversation, in which Kanoute showed her I.D. and said she had been working as a teacher’s assistant in the summer program. She said it was unfortunate that police call on people of color, and he apologized for the misunderstanding. Kanoute was outraged and said so on Facebook. She also asked the administration to share the name of the worker who called the campus police and facilitate a conversation between them. The college’s president, Kathleen McCartney, apologized publicly to Kanoute and put the janitor who had called the police on paid leave but did not give his name to Kanoute. Unsatisfied, Kanoute named two Smith employees on Facebook whom she thought responsible. (Powell cites a Facebook post by Kanoute, in which she names an employee: “this is the racist person.”) Kanoute had misidentified one person, who was not in the vicinity at the time, and suggested a second, who was there, had been responsible for the call to police, when a later review found that was not the case. She retracted the post but not before it was widely seen. An independent report by a law firm found that none of the workers were responsible for discriminating against Kanoute but recommended that Smith review and change its training and policies about how to respond to “suspicious persons.”
Powell emphasized the difficulty that this had caused the workers involved in the incident. Of the two who were wrongly accused, one said that she received threats at home, and the other left his job not long afterward. That fall, the Black student groups organized a walkout of the convocation in protest. Meanwhile, the college instituted anti-bias training, which, according to Powell, further alienated service workers, who, after being accused of racism, were now being asked by political consultants “about their childhood and family assumptions about race.” The administration knew how to notice the problems of implicit bias and structural racism but not how to resolve them, and so what might have been a relatively mundane conflict mushroomed into one that the university simply could not solve.
Each of these incidents, up close, turned not on the intervention of activists, or the mechanisms of mass protest, but on the anxieties and misjudgments of élites. That held true in cases in which the activist was outspoken (as at Smith) or perhaps hypothetical (as with Seuss). The college president, the city-council subcommittee, the panel of experts: these figures are often described by their political opponents as if they were as coherent and determined as a closed fist—that there is something cohesive that could be called cancel culture. My own sense is that something close to the opposite is true. The claims of racial justice have upended liberal élites in interesting and profound ways, and left them deeply uncertain: about how much history should be revised, about what kinds of retributive steps should be taken, and, above all, about how many people, really, want radical change.
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