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Tuesday
If evidence is needed that attacks on “Critical Race Theory” have nothing to do with actual CRT—that they are instead attempts to prevent teachers from mentioning America’s tortured history with race—you have but to look at a recent incident involving Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. In this instance, it wasn’t even the teacher who was censored but one of the students.
The Sneetches is a parable about discrimination, where the sneetches with stars oppress those without:
Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small.
You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all.
But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches
Would brag, “We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.”
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort
“We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!”
And whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
They’d hike right on past them without even talking.
The results of this prejudice are put in terms that a child can relate to:
When the Star-Belly children went out to play ball,
Could a Plain-Belly get in the game…? Not at all.
You could only play if your bellies had stars
And the Plain-Belly children had none upon thars.
Written in the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, there’s no question about what kind of discrimination Dr. Seuss had in mind although the story of course applies to other kinds of prejudice as well. Now for the news story:
The assistant director of communications for Olentangy Local School District abruptly stopped the reading of the Dr. Seuss book “The Sneetches” to a third-grade classroom during an NPR podcast after students asked about race.
Shale Meadows Elementary School third grade teacher Mandy Robek was reading “The Sneetches” to her class as part of NPR’s latest episode of Planet Money about the economic lessons in children’s books. During the podcast, which aired Friday, Amanda Beeman, the assistant director of communications for the school district, stopped the reading part way through the book.
In the episode, it wasn’t even the teacher who applied the lesson but a student. Here are further details:
“It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … Like, disrespected … Like, white people disrespected Black people…,” a third grade student is heard saying on the podcast.
Robek keeps on reading, but it’s shortly after this student’s comment is made on the podcast that Beeman interrupts the reading.
“I just don’t think that this is going to be the discussion that we wanted around economics,” Beeman said on the podcast. “So I’m sorry. We’re going to cut this one off.”
Queried afterwards about her decision, the clearly defensive Beeman revealed how much pressure schools are under regarding discussions of race:
Beeman explained to The Dispatch on Monday that the school district agreed to be part of the “Planet Money” story “to feature the great work that Mrs. Robek does.”
“We do not ban any books,” Beeman said.
“As (The Sneetches) was being read, I made a personal judgment call we shouldn’t do the reading because of some of the other themes and undertones that were unfolding that were not shared that we would be discussing with parents,” Beeman said.
A good work of fiction, of course, is never about just one thing and a good teacher will be open to teachable moments when they arise. Given how one of the students started applying Sneetches to things he/she had encountered elsewhere, this was definitely a teachable moment. Because of rightwing pressure on schools, however, such moments are seen as dangerous.
A couple of years ago, conservatives were upset that a publisher was choosing not to republish certain Dr. Seuss books because they contained racist caricatures. (See my post on that here.) The books weren’t among the author’s popular books, (with the possible exception of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street) so few would even notice. Nevertheless, passionate defenses of Green Eggs and Ham (which is still being published) were launched on the floor of Congress.
Now that the right is aware of Seuss liberal sentiments, however, can we expect the right to defend the author’s other message books, like The Lorax (about trashing the environment) and The Butter Battle Book (about the arms race)?
For these books do have an impact, encouraging kids to grapple with significant issues in ways that are both stimulating and fun. Of course, that’s not a problem if you want to teach kids how to think for themselves. And really, only the most inveterate racists will quarrel with the ending of Sneetches:
But McBean was quite wrong. I’m quite happy to say
The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day,
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.
Then again, I guess this is indeed White supremacy’s great replacement fear—that the formerly privileged will no longer retain those privileges.
Further thought: While it sounds like the Olentangy teacher is quite good, I do share the administrator’s confusion about the book’s economic applicability. I suppose it might address issues of class disparity—haves and have-nots—only the plot informs us that stars can be added and erased by Fix-it-Up Chappie’s wondrous machine. Markets don’t exactly work this way.
Unless the teacher was trying to teach a version of Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about conspicuous consumption (in Theory of the Leisure Class)—how the lower classes strive to imitate the upper class. Such behavior helps explain the tulipmania in 17th century Holland, which led to one of capitalism’s great crashes.
Or maybe the lesson was about Whites being threatened by formerly oppressed groups (Blacks, women) rising in wealth, power, and influence. Now, that would certainly be an economic lesson—although not one the Olentangy administrator would find any better.
One other thought: The book can also be seen as having another kind of racial theme. With more and more kids of mixed race coming into the world (including all five of my grandchildren), will traditional race distinctions gradually fade away? To be sure, as both Barack Obama and later Meghan Markle discovered to their sorrow, thinking of yourself as mixed doesn’t mean that others will see you that way. Our Sneetches with stars have been very definite about labeling such people as Sneetches without stars—as opposed to, say, Sneetches with half stars. But with interracial intermarrying becoming more and more common, will things change? Of will we, in our seeming infinite capacity to find ways to divide people, insist on ever more subtle distinctions. I think of the book about How the Irish Became White.
Then again, should we object to how Seuss appears to be advocating for a version of melting pot assimilation. This became more problematic in the 1970s.
Interestingly, the first I ever encountered this notion was in John Howard Giffin’s Black Like Me (1961), which I read in high school. In it, Griffin tells how he darkened his skin and passed himself off as Black to discover what Blacks were going through. I remember the scene where, as a hitchhiker, he is picked up by a White man who explains that it’s only a matter of time before intermingling will one day make everyone indistinguishable. Black Like Me appeared the same year as Sneetches.
Isn’t having our kids launch into these and similar debates be what education should be all about? Don’t ban. Debate!
One last thing: I just learned from Wikipedia that in 1998, following the Bosnian war, NATO had Sneetches translated into Serbo-Croatian and distributed 50,000 copies amongst the population to encourage tolerance.
