Demonizing others is what we all do now.
In the Star Wars universe, stormtroopers participate in demonizing the Rebellion, calling their enemies "Rebel scum!” before firing their blasters.
And in a galaxy not so far away, in our universe on planet earth we label others Libs, Demo-RATS, social justice warriors, snowflakes, woke, bigots, misogynists, idiots, tyrannical warmongers, etc. etc. before updating our status or posting a comment or rolling our eyes at those crazy, insanely stupid people.
And when we engage in this enraged behavior, we become the very demons we are seeking to eradicate or defend.
How to Navigate the Latest Culture War
As a Christian, there are two basic beliefs that guide how I am to engage in the polarizing culture wars that are American politics in the twenty-first century.
The first basic belief is that I am to tell the truth as best as I can (Eph 4:15; 1 Cor. 13:12), even if it doesn’t advance or reflect my own political opinions. Jesus himself is “the truth” (Jn. 14:6), and I believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, knowing that as a creature I, and any other person is limited in our ability to see everything clearly because we view the world through a subjective truth lens—shaped by our DNA, experience, knowledge, feelings, and social conditioning.
The second basic belief is that I am to affirm the human dignity of every other person. Christians believe that every human being—no matter who, what, where, or why they come from—has inherent dignity and value, because every human being is made in the image of God. Theologians call this the imago dei. Scripture teaches this in the opening of the creation narrative (Genesis 1:26-27). And later on in the story of salvation, God himself in Christ takes on human flesh, he is the very “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). In Christ, God cared enough about human dignity to become human forever.
So with the principle of truth-telling and the doctrine of human dignity in mind, I start to read the news headlines that are deliberately crafted to make my blood boil, do fact-checking, start reading the narratives that both sides are trying to tell, and prayerfully reach my own conclusions. This is a process, it takes time, and this is something we just don’t do in our culture. We crave soundbites and labels because it does the hard work for us, and it makes us feel good about ourselves by validating our opinions. It’s much easier to label others; it’s hard work to do what I’m suggesting we do.
No doubt by now you’ve formed an opinion about Dr. Seuss.
Either you’re convinced that he’s a racist and you no longer want children to read his books, or you’re decrying “cancel culture” and are deeply concerned about the future of an America that seems to be headed toward book burning fascism.
But there is another way—it just takes a little bit longer. You’ll have to hold back your rage and calm down some. And, we’ll all have to move away from the soundbites.
The Controversy Over National Reading Day and Dr. Seuss’ Birthday
Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced on March 2, 2021 that it would stop publishing and licensing six Dr. Seuss books that have been criticized for how they depict Black and Asian people. Many titles from Dr. Seuss will remain on bookshelves, including the "Cat in the Hat," "Green Eggs and Ham," "The Lorax" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"
But the company said it decided in 2020 to remove the following six titles:
"Dr. Seuss Enterprises, working with a panel of experts, including educators, reviewed our catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,’ ‘If I Ran the Zoo,’ ‘McElligot’s Pool,’ ‘On Beyond Zebra!’, ‘Scrambled Eggs Super!’, and ‘The Cat’s Quizzer’."
Why? Because the company has decided that these “books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
A few days before this public statement was made, Loudoun County Public Schools, an affluent district in the U.S., made an announcement on February 26th saying that as “many schools continue to celebrate ‘Read Across America Day’ in partial recognition of Dr. Seuss’ birthday, it is important for us to be cognizant of research that may challenge our practice in this regard. As we become more culturally responsive and racially conscious, all building leaders should know that in recent years there has been research revealing radical undertones in the books written and the illustrations drawn by Dr. Seuss.”
With these statements gaining traction in media outlets, President Biden broke precedent with the last two administrations by a sin of omission. President Biden didn’t verbally condemn Dr. Seuss, but he didn’t mention Dr. Seuss last Tuesday, March 2nd either.
This is important, given that other Presidents typically have made the association. On the same day of the year that encourages our youth to read, back in 2014 President Obama said Dr. Seuss’ stories “challenge dictators and discrimination. They call us to open our minds, to take responsibility for ourselves and our planet.” Additionally, back in 2016, President Obama said Dr. Seuss was “one of America’s revered wordsmiths” who has “used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.”
(Zoolander commercial break: Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Talking about our youth reading immediately brought this to mind.)
But these public statements made by the company, a school district, and the omitted statement from our current POTUS have sparked all kinds of media frenzy and furry. I’ve waited several days to write about this because, by now the blood has stopped boiling—although per usual, some damage has been done.
People I’ve talked to in the last several days already believe Dr. Seuss was a racist. Or, other people I’ve spoken with are convinced that cancel culture is destroying America. But there’s more to the story, and sadly, nobody is talking about it. Journalism today is just not what it used to be.
Yes, Dr. Seuss Was A Racist—And a Xenophobe, Too!
Theodore Seuss Geisel, or as we know him—Dr. Seuss, used his creativity to rally more Americans to the Allied cause during World War II. He crafted pro-America and anti-Japanese/German cartoons that were featured in print across the nation. As a patriotic supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was committed to fighting against the fascism propagated by the Axis powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy).
However, in his cartoons, Dr. Seuss’ depictions went further than mere patriotism. His artwork depicted Japanese people as sub-human, punting what he created into the categories of pure racism and xenophobia.
He also depicted Jews as stingy and once depicted African Americans as monkeys. So, there’s that.
Now I know what people do. To defend Dr. Seuss’ sinful depictions, we might be tempted to say he was just “a man of his time.” While there is a kernel of truth to this statement, and Dr. Seuss probably wasn’t as racist as some of the other cartoonists that were alive back then, it doesn’t give him a free pass because the standard of truth is not how someone is doing compared to others (e.g. Dr. Seuss had fewer depictions of Japanese people portrayed as monkeys than his contemporaries, ergo, he’s not a racist), but how someone holds up in comparison to God’s standards (e.g. depicting any human being as being less than human is to distort the dignity that belongs to every person). I wrote about this phenomenon years ago in Fathom Magazine, in an article entitled “My Relative, A Slave Owner” about the racism of our theological heroes.
Anyway, appealing to historical context doesn’t excuse Dr. Seuss. What he created during his earlier years was wrong, and he knew that. He couldn’t go back in time and unprint every cartoon that was featured in newspapers and magazines across the country.
But he could change what he wanted to print in the future.
And this is something that I find missing from all of the swirling, babbling, degrading news outlets on both the political right and the political left.
It’s the simple truth that Dr. Seuss was a person, too, who like you and like me—is capable of experiencing change over time.
Dr. Seuss was no different, and no exception. He was a person, too. Oddly, it’s radical to say this, isn’t it?
How Dr. Seuss’ Racist and Xenophobic Heart Grew From Being Two Sizes, Too Small
“It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight. But I think that the most likely reason of all. May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.” —Dr. Seuss, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”
When Dr. Seuss visited Japan and witnessed the aftermath of what something as destructive as atomic bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could do to people—something within him changed. Dr. Seuss’s heart that was two sizes, two small grew three sizes larger.
For the first time in his life, like the Grinch discovering the true meaning of Christmas, Dr. Seuss saw Japanese people as fully human—not as subhuman.
Toward the end of the war and in the years to follow, Dr. Seuss tried to publicly apologize in the only way he knew how: By artistically and creatively teaching others a new, better message about others. He created an instructional video for the military in 1945 called “Your Job in Japan,” but it was rejected by General MacArthur for being “too sympathetic” to the Japanese.
More famously though, and perhaps more familiar to us, he came up with the idea for a children’s book that would be published in 1954 where he would repeatedly teach the simple and profound truth that “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”
In Horton Hears A Who!, which Dr. Seuss dedicated to his “Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan” whom he met during his visit to Japan, this elephant named “Horton” tells other jungle creatures about the existence of a very tiny civilization called “Who-ville,” and where the elephant does everything in his power to protect this small world from total annihilation. He succeeds, and eventually the whole jungle realizes that Horton’s not crazy, but was telling the truth. Who-ville exists, and they all need to protect the Who’s from mass extinction.
By teaching young children that “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss hoped to re-educate the nation’s young and instill in every child the ethic that every person’s life matters—American, Japanese, German, & Jew.
Why We Should Remember, Not Erase the Past
I find this shift in Dr. Seuss’s own thinking to be enlightening, and I wish more news outlets would talk about it instead of hurling stones from across the aisle. The volatile, hyper charged rhetoric that we find in our media outlets is dehumanizing and makes subhumans out of all of us.
As I’ve reflected on the earlier works of Dr. Seuss, I’m not sure that getting rid of his six racist books accomplishes what we hope it will. If we get rid of the books that led up to Dr. Seuss’ life-changing transformation, that rips out the heart of his story and development as a human being. If the goal is to end racism (which, I’m beginning to doubt is why the company printing all of Seuss’ works initially made this decision. At the end of the day, their decision reflects the bottom line—it was likely motivated by corporate finances and not by corporate values.), how does acting like racism never existed put an end to racism?
In truth, ending racism can’t mean erasing every memory of racism in our collective past—for if we do, we will inevitably fail to remember the pain and atrocities that were committed in our past, and we might end up recommitting them in the future.
Which would you rather have: (A) a country full of people who are colorblind to racism, because they have no recollection of it, or (B) a country full of people who acknowledge the sins of our fathers and refuse to give into hate in the present and future because they have learned from the past? (Actually, I’d rather have none of the above, but this is the real world and tragically, racism exists in the hearts of humans. So I’d take the second option, (B).)
Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
If we refuse to listen to the transformational and powerful stories of a racist, xenophobic man like Dr. Seuss coming to his senses and realizing that the very people he once demonized were just like him, and were even worthy of being his great friends—don’t we get rid of the opportunity to allow for real, powerful, change to take place in the hearts and minds of our children and ourselves along with it?
I could be wrong, but erasing the past sounds like it puts an impossible burden onto all of us—that we must be perfect, or else! It furthers an environment of fear and intolerance.
What if I say the wrong thing, will I be publicly shamed and crucified by the media—the Right might call me a “snowflake!” for trying to be more sensitive, and the Left might call me a “racist!” for defending someone who once held racist beliefs?
Instead of being human, where we are in process—flawed and fumbling—we are held to a standard of impossible perfection—ye must be perfect, as the Twitter mob is perfect.
While we can’t erase the past sins of anyone who has ever lived, just like we can’t erase the record or memory of our own sins, we can take notice of how and when and why people change.
(By the way, as a Christian I do believe there is a God who can and does forgive all of our sins in Christ—where he actually does pull a Dr. Seuss Enterprises on us and ceases to publish not just six books, but every book that contains a record of our vile sins.)
Yes, I do understand that in a free-market capitalist society the decision to take six of Dr. Seuss’ books off the shelf belongs to the company itself and if they want to get rid of 6, or 7, or all of Dr. Seuss’s works in print because it is offensive or somehow contributes to white supremacy they do have the right to do this.
The fundamental question here though is, should we?
Has a Dr. Seuss book being read to a child ever produced a racist like Dylan Roof? Do we have thousands of Gen Z’ers rallying to re-start up concentration camps, all because they were read Dr. Seuss books when they were children? It’s not like we need a children’s book to learn racism. Racism springs forth from the human heart.
If we eliminate every book that has said something wrong, we’ll never learn how to think critically about anything. We’ll lose the ability to engage foreign ideas and process them through our own framework. Back in college, I remember reading some of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. When I first read The Gay Science and then Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as a faith-based person who believes in the existence of God, I could have sounded off about how offensive it is to read that “God is dead” from a now dead philosopher.
But I never did.
Far from discouraging my faith in the person and work of Christ, reading Nietzsche propelled me into a deeper commitment to all that Christianity has to offer a postmodern, post-Christian world.
Nietzsche read the sign of the times and pointed out that “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”, and anything “built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it”, such as “the whole of our European morality”, is going to “collapse” (The Gay Science, p. 343).
Christianity lost its footing as a framework for ethics, and so everything in society has proven to be less certain and stable than everyone realized. When he said, “God is dead,” he was lamenting what this means for the Western world—what will be left to replace God, now that he’s irrelevant?
As the philosopher of our age, Charles Taylor, has labeled it—we are currently living in a secular age where society has moved from “belief in God” as “unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to be embraced” (A Secular Age, p. 3) What Nietzsche said in the mid-nineteenth century became true in the twenty-first century. Today, many are like Nietzsche, people “who feel bound to give it [religion] up, even though they mourn its loss.”
I appreciated the thoughtful articulation and never wanted to burn these books or tell my professors not to suggest that we read Nietzsche. Reading challenging, sometimes very uncomfortable and sometimes very confusing words helped me grow as a person. It helped me listen to nuanced, different perspectives and opposing arguments.
What concerns me about our heated cultural moment is the inability to listen to or engage diverse facts, opinions, perspectives, and experiences. It’s all or nothing—you’re either a racist or an anti-racist—a Fascist or a Marxist—a Socialist or a Capitalist. We tear down the Other, to prop up our own identity group. We have all become oppressed-oppressors.
And it’s exhausting! I can’t keep up.
One moment we’re celebrating, and another we’re outraged. But all of this heat without light is inconsistent. We can celebrate that Thomas Jefferson in 1776 penned those glorious words in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” but lament the fact that Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings throughout the course of his life.
The Right commends Jefferson for the truth he stated, the Left condemns Jefferson for the life he lived. Both sides ridicule the other for their intolerance and stupidity. And those of us who get sucked into this stuff increase cortisol levels, probably risk an earlier death, and our blood boils over sixteen times.
As we process Dr. Seuss, statues, or cancelling thought and diverse speech, maybe just think about what this stuff does to us over time—and whether or not any person can bear the burden of being guiltless and sinless for all of time. No president, politician, pastor, philanthropist, psychiatrist, police officer, principal, or person will ever meet that standard. The only One who ever has was victimized brutally by an angry mob, who strung him up to hang on a criminal’s cross.
We should be able to contextualize people who lived in the past. Yes, many of the Virginian Founding Fathers—from Washington to Jefferson—were slave owners, but statues were put up to commemorate not their slave holding but other pursuits, interests, successes, and dreams they held to. As MLK dreamed by quoting Jefferson, "One day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed...that all men are created equal." The broken past was used to heal and forge a better future.
Yes, Dr. Seuss was a racist and xenophobe, but he also changed his heart about those he once belittled. Where in the headlines, where in the political grandstanding do we read stories about how this is possible? Well, we don’t. Because it doesn’t fit the simple, quick, polarized narratives.
A country capable of discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly about our past—rather than wishing it away—will be much stronger and better for it. And beyond tearing down or cancelling everything that signals hatred, maybe we can begin to find new ways to celebrate and reflect the kind of country and nation we want to be. Maybe telling and showing and teaching our children how a man like Thomas Seuss Geisel changed his mind about other people, is the pathway to changing how we each, individually feel about the Other party, the Other enemy, the Other who stands on opposing sides.
Years ago, before Dr. Seuss was a swirling controversy or distraction, a children’s lit scholar said “I think to understand Seuss fully, you need to understand the complexity of his career. You need to understand that he’s involved in both anti-racism and racism, and I don’t think you get that if you omit the political work.”
In other words, if we take out the bad we destroy the good along with it.
As American philosopher Susan Neiman writes, affirming Germany’s efforts to build monuments after the atrocities of WWII that reflect the nations values has pointed out:
“The city was not rebuilt to reflect what is, but what ought to be. Berlin’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic should commit itself to holding. Is it too much to ask America to do the same? For as James’ oration concluded, “The lesson that our war ought most of all to teach us is that evils must be checked in time, before they grow too great.”
Will we begin to do the hard work of recovering human dignity—starting with the truth that a person’s a person, no matter how small—instead of flinging insults and ad hominems at others? Are we still capable of finding a better way to engage people—real human beings—who lived in the past and tweet or post in our present? Can we acknowledge flaws and celebrate strengths? Or is that too hard for us? Will we choose to become the very thing we claim to hate?
As for me and church I serve in, Christians have an obligation to live differently. A lot of those who believe that Christianity is true probably need to repent for how we’ve mistreated others, name-called, or spoken truth without any love. And we have an ethical grounding and framework, a real reason to do so and to live in this new, better way. Christians believe that God cared enough about humans to become human himself (Phil. 2:1-13).
In Christ, God himself has embodied what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and to live in such a way that is consistent and wholesome, humble and beautiful. But this way is costly and narrow. It is anything but easy. But, gifts are given to walk in this way. If you are in Christ, it is “yours already.”
