This is the Culture to Cancel

A spat over a Cat (the one in the Hat)

Writing in the Sunday, May 16 edition of The Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss reopens a discussion she had with Philip Nel, author of the 2017 book, “Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books.” Strauss initiated a conversation with Nel shortly after his book came out, and then she reprised the conversation earlier this year, when, as Strauss writes, “…it was falsely reported that a Virginia school district had banned the books of Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel.”

In her article, Strauss gives Nel an opportunity to discuss anew the politicization of racism in children’s books, and Nel opens his piece with this:

“Why not break up with your favorite racist childhood classics? Maybe doing so will break your heart a little. But, to quote a line attributed to Rumi (but which is probably not him), ‘You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.’ ”

Nel continues:

It is possible to cancel a culture. More than 300 Indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States. Only about 175 of those languages remain today. Colonization, genocide, forced assimilation have all been very effective at canceling cultures.

However, the “cancel culture” that animates professional grievance actors today refers to culture under no threat of cancellation. Dr. Seuss books. Muppets. Disney. White innocence. Because it’s hard to cancel a dominant culture. “Cancel culture” is a white-supremacist fantasy that creates villains and then mobilizes anger against the villains it has imagined.

To censor anti-racist critiques, cancel culture hysterics describe anti-racism as censorship. To attack the freedom to fight oppression, they claim that withdrawing racist children’s books is somehow an assault on freedom. This is doublespeak, the culture-war version of former president Donald Trump’s “big lie.”

Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceased publishing six Dr. Seuss books. But these six books are not censored, not banned, not illegal. I own all six and have spoken of them very publicly — on television, sometimes holding the books up to the screen. No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies. And 50 other Seuss books are still in print.

The lie of cancel culture depends upon nostalgia. As Walter Benjamin once observed, children’s culture evokes what is both cherished and lost, a combination that has the potential to be make us reactionary.”

For your consideration: Five Points

I quote Nel at length—with Ms. Strauss’s permission—because what Nel offers is a clear-eyed five-part strategy—or coping mechanisms—for reviewing what we thought and felt about what we read or saw. Nel’s five points offer a reasonable path toward building an honest, realistic assessment of how we need to examine those earlier, lost, ideas. That path leads to a goal of creating a model of behavior that honestly informs us of the pain, unfairness, inequality, injustice, and immorality of the stereotypes we either willfully or unconsciously embraced and promoted because, at the time, they were helpful to our own sheltered ends. Nel’s five points—condensed here, but available in Strauss’s link, above—are:

First: “Reject the notion that children’s culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and “innocence.” Embrace Dr. Seuss’s poetic brilliance but reject the toxicity of his racism or his sexism.”

Second: “Unlearn popular myths about history and social progress — myths that defend Dr. Seuss (born in 1904) as a “man of his time” or that say, ‘That’s how they thought back then.’ At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike. You can test this thesis right now: Do all people think alike in 2021?”

Third: “Unlearn the ‘either/or’ idea of racism. Racism is not an either/or. It’s a both/and. Starting in childhood, we absorb racist images and ideas without our knowledge and without our consent. Dr. Seuss was not aware of how thoroughly his imagination was steeped in a white-supremacist culture.”

Fourth: “Unlearn the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent. Many have said that Dr. Seuss didn’t intend racism in his caricatures, and that his anti-racist works prove that. But racism doesn’t depend upon perception or intent. It’s very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.”

Fifth: “Because any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don’t see. On the morning of March 2, I I heard that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was withdrawing these six books, via a text from my friend, professor Sarah Park Dahlen. And I immediately thought: ‘“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” and “Scrambled Eggs Super!” will be withdrawn for their racist caricatures. They were.’”

Is he talking about me?

Strauss’s article and Philip Nel’s commentary touched on many of the books I grew up with (I’m a Boomer, born in 1949). But his five points also caused me to revisit my reactions to those books my parents read to me when I was still a small boy and many of which I continued reading in my pre-teens. From Little Black Sambo to Song of the South to numerous Disney films and myriad children’s books, films, and songs considered at the time “family friendly,” I had a child’s reason to believe then that such entertainment simply made me feel good, comfortable, and at a blissfully unaware peace with the world around me. The concept of racism, much less the idea that I was aware of the racial overtones of those movies and books, was simply not part of my childhood lexicon or thinking.

Uncle Remus, for example, as played by James Baskett in Song of the South, was not a Black man to me; he was a comforter, a gentle hand on my heart…a heart that knew nothing at all about the sad state of Blacks in America, or the unconscionable history that attaches to every Black American. Remus’s simple wisdom (“Don’t you know you can’t run away from trouble?” “He [Br’er Rabbit] left his old troubles behind, alright, but he was headin’ straight for a whole mess of brand new troubles.”) mirrored the truths my parents, teachers, and faith leaders espoused on a regular basis.

Both my grandfathers—Gramps and Dinty—were comforting figures throughout my childhood. They were kind and gentle men who cared very much for their grandson’s heart. Gramps's deep New England voice and Dinty’s soft Tennessee lilt enraptured me with their respective life lessons offered just as powerfully, touchingly, as Uncle Remus’s stereotyped sing-song Southern drawl held my charmed attention.

Viewed from a track parallel to other children’s books and films of my 1950s youth, the Seuss books (my first memory is of Horton Hears a Who), offered their own wackily-drawn life lessons, complete with ridiculous characters and fantastic locales totally removed from anything in my real world. And that was fine with me.

For me, Seuss offered simple, easy to follow narratives about how differences are really not so different; how kindness goes a long way; how intransigence is counterproductive; how striving for elitism is really a path to moral bankruptcy; how there is a whole world out there to be explored as long as you have courage to take it on; how each of us is special but, at the same time, not too special to be any better than the next kid. Lessons about the pitfalls of disobedience and lying (Cat in the Hat) were made vivid under Seuss’s creative hand. 

It wasn’t until decades later that the subject of the Cat’s ethnicity or color came to my attention. And once the book became a target in the mid 2010s—assailed as a blackface parody, a minstrel show, a slapstick Vaudeville act for two White kids and a snide fish— some educators and political activists began getting nervous not only about Cat, but about other Seussian characters and story lines. Which brings us to Valerie Strauss’s story reprising Philip Nel’s 2017 article, and the troubling aspects of cancel culture weighing in on childhood icons promoted by imprecise family history.

Like millions of Americans, I have spent hours exploring family trees, fascinated (sometimes mystified) by every new detail that becomes available as more and more DNA and historical data is fed into the genealogical engine. I never miss an episode of Finding Your Roots, and I still have dreams of visiting my family’s 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century ancestral homes in Ireland, England, and Scotland. My mother’s side of the family arrived on the Mayflower. Her relative, Stephen Hopkins, had been with the Jamestown colonists before taking on navigating duties aboard the Mayflower. 

My father’s family came a bit later, leaving Ireland and arriving in Virginia in the late 17th century, settling first in North Carolina in the 1700s, and then finding their way to Tennessee in the mid-1800s.The genealogical record is packed with the history of the Moore diaspora across the mid-Atlantic- and Columbia River South, and the profusion of Moores in North Carolina alone makes it rough going to tease out the actual family line attached to my bunch.

Beginning to tie it all together...painfully

Where does all this fit in with cancel culture and The Cat in the Hat? It fits because while I enjoyed hearing all the stories about my ancestors—all the good, exciting, founders and pioneers stuff—there was a growing body of information available to me over time to ascertain certain uncomfortable truths which would make those oft-told tales more realistic in terms of the racism that pervaded every aspect of my family’s story. But I chose not to examine those truths that didn’t fit well in my privileged comfort zone, preferring the whiter side of the genealogical gray areas to the darker ones that might upset my center of gravity. That attitude falls into the “we-know-what-we-want-to-know” category, a classic cancel culture mindset.

The Mayflower colonists and those who followed in their wake were not tolerant, Indigenous-people-embracing, open-minded men and women. The first Thanksgiving myth is just that…a myth propagated over the centuries and promoted by White politicians to ensure that school children got one side of the story, a White-owned version of a multifaceted experience that often did not end well for the Native Americans, and laid the groundwork for generations of White denial and manifest destiny rationalized genocide. 

I have no doubt that my ancestors who walked off the Mayflower and into family lore were not ready to accept a different people who populated a well-developed society. Native Americans may have been willing to share their food, but they were unwilling to bow in subservience to the newcomers. The first feel good moments were soon replaced by brutal cultural clashes.

Does that mean I should muffle some of my ancestors’ accomplishments? One of my great uncles was Dr. Hiram Corliss, a hard-core abolitionist in New York, an integral cog in the Underground Railroad. My mother’s father, Charles Brackett, was an early contributor to the NAACP and supported the defense of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. A certain amount of family pride attaches to these two men for their willingness to stand against White supremacy. Right? Well, maybe, but there are counterbalancing and difficult-to-explore histories that caused me to look at unsettling details of my family tree.

Taking off the blinders

Here is where I appreciate Nel’s first two points: “Reject the notion that children’s culture must inspire only pure-hearted affection for its simplicity and ‘innocence”; and, “unlearn popular myths about history and social progress. At all times in any given place, all people did not think alike.”

As Charles Brackett’s biographer, I’ve read more than 30 years of his diaries, including those covering his most active years in Hollywood—1935-1955. On the racism front, Hollywood has little to be proud of during those years (and we’re not even going to begin discussing 1915’s Birth of a Nation). As an Oscar-winning writer/producer and as an executive of the Screen Writers Guild, my grandfather knew and worked with racist and misogynist motion picture icons. He knew and worked with the producers who were cowed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into firing actors and directors accused of being communists (The Hollywood 10).

You don't have to achieve a balance

My grandfather knew all of them, knew what the Blacklist would do to their careers, but he did not fall on his professional sword for them, (nor did he turn his back on them in public or in private despite his strong Republican political leanings). What I found particularly irksome—and unresolved—about my grandfather’s diaries is that he so often used ethnic slurs to describe his Jewish colleagues, and he used raw or unflattering language to describe female actresses who did not meet his standards of beauty. How do I balance all of this out? I shouldn’t have to, and I don’t.

I must parse the family stories I once took as truth and examine anew those elements which make me uncomfortable today—the human frailty, sexism, religious intolerance, brutality, and racism that may have been common in their world but which were still morally wrong. Holding them accountable—even centuries later—strengthens the foundation of my understanding. It is not enough to simply say “Ecce Homo” and give a pass to my grandfather’s character flaws as less important than his virtues.

I struggle with one aspect of Nel’s admonition: I cannot unlearn the myths. They have become part of my own story. But I can place them in their proper perspective, and strive not teach them to the next generation, and impress upon them Nel’s point, that “…any culture you grow up in seems natural and inevitable, sometimes you simply don’t see.”

Striking too close to home: a terrible inventory

Of all the family stories that I wanted to embrace as a boy were those of my father’s side of the family, the spread-out band ranging from the Carolinas to the western reaches of Tennessee and to Texas beyond. There were stories of patriot heroes, notable educators, and hapless frontiersmen (an uncle who froze to death, sitting on a tree stump with his rifle on his lap). But, with the help of a deeper historical review, troublesome truths emerged.

In the honorable shadow of a Revolutionary War officer Moore who acquitted himself well under Washington’s command, there was found an ominous passage from the inventory of one of my great grandmothers, a widow who inherited her husband’s property in 1805. At the top of the page, a clerk in North Carolina wrote, “Five Negroes.”

And there it was. A direct link between me and human bondage; a hot wire running from an 18th century auction block to my 21st century heart.

When I read that line, cold and impersonal on my computer screen, I felt the shame and sadness and pain of those five human beings. They were not Uncle Remus with bluebirds on their shoulders. They were owned, inventoried and enslaved property, and an unknowable number of people in my family line accepted their condition as normal, just, and defensible.

To be clear, I’d known for many years that there were Moores fighting for the Confederacy, just as I’d known there was a Moore who fought and died at the Battle of New Orleans under the command of Andrew Jackson, arguably the country’s foremost advocate of total genocide. But until I opted to dig deeper, those Moores were incomplete sketches along the family line. While it is possible that the Confederate Moore’s motivation may have been to fight against “Northern aggression” rather than for slavery, the inescapable truth is that the cause for which he fought was an extension of that hateful inventory of owned humans compiled for my great grandmother 60 years earlier. And that inventory item is probably only one data point connecting those owned human beings to earlier families of enslaved people.

With these images in mind—a Jacksonian soldier, a slave owner, a fighter for a hateful cause, and, most likely, others in the family line whose racism, implicit or complicit, advanced the suppression of Blacks and other minorities—I have adopted two more of Nel’s points: I will try harder to “unlearn the ‘either/or’ idea of racism. Racism is not an either/or. It’s a both/and.” Also, I need to work harder to “unlearn the notion that racism depends upon perception or intent.” As Nels notes, “Racism doesn’t depend upon perception or intent. It’s very easy to participate in white supremacy without awareness or active malice.”

A rising tide won't float some boats

During my career as a Cabinet speechwriter, I often fell back on the “a rising tide lifts all boats” maxim to assure the audience that whatever program or policy the administration was flogging at the time, everyone would benefit in the end as long as everyone got on board. With hindsight, I have come to realize that the epigram was never about something concrete, something possible, something worthy of effort. Too often, the “rising tide” aphorism assumes everyone has a boat to begin with. We know that is not remotely true. And just as often, we presume the waters on which those who do have boats are all the same waters. That is not true either.

In the real world, many people, despite their best efforts, find themselves on economically- or emotionally-fragile boats tied fast to piers of hopelessness or run aground on reefs of social injustice. For them, any rising tide—of motives pure and righteous or motives evil and selfish—will overwhelm and swamp their already unstable skiffs.

In the real world, many people have no boats at all—they are treading water in financial, employment, mental, marital, parental, geographic, or educational shallows, their toes barely, if ever, touching the sand beneath them. For them, a rising tide benefitting others will only increase their risk of drowning.

Time to cancel cancel culture

The clear and azure economic waters in which CEOs and hedge fund managers sail their yachts are not the same stained and brown frightening waters that surround the leaky rowboats of the poor and disenfranchised who live a paycheck away from bankruptcy or homelessness, or who have no paycheck at all. To think otherwise—to embrace trickle-down theory or up-by-your-bootstraps MAGA-deluded conservatism—is to engage in a sort of magical thinking that the waters of the world rise and fall with equanimity, humanity, and generosity. They do not, though there is a culture of denial that continues to promote that dangerous thinking. It is a culture the wild-eyed machinations of which make The Cat in the Hat’s house-wrecking behavior seem tame by comparison.

It is a culture that believes in a decentralized, one-size-fits-all-who-are-entitled-to-it government (especially if that size is small and cheap), while willfully ignoring the input of critical liberal thought, inclusivity, and planning that would put the kibosh on ruthless profiteering.

It is the culture that promotes leadership by fear, threats, and reprisals; it is the culture that panders to the rich and persecutes the poor; it is the culture that seeks to Photoshop history by painting over every dark background with white; it is the culture that raises barriers to progress while lowering barriers to nonsensical environment deniers; it is the culture that rewards the ignorant politician by silencing the educated voter.  It is a culture long overdue for cancellation.

An example: civilization at its worst

The injustices and inhumanity visited upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas by uninvited European voyagers bent on geographic and cultural dominion serve as just one example of the unintended consequences of imperial hubris. In a truly enlightened world, the dull reverberations of the gilded bells of ruthless hegemony and genocide would serve as examples of cancel culture in its most corrupt guise. Unfortunately, the centuries-long lessons of racial predation and the objectification of native heritage amount to "who cares?" among far too many  people.  

Break the cycle, lean in to accountability 

My son Carter, a former U.S. government employee who moved to Australia several years ago, comes at the issue of cancel culture from his perspective of working for the governments of two democracies equally freighted with old and new racial, social, political, and economic baggage. In an online exchange we had recently on the topic of cancelling or rebranding cancel culture, Carter wrote, "The mission isn’t to erase an uneasy heritage, but expose it to break the cycle of its ugliness being bequeathed to future generations." 

I couldn't agree more, and I've thought-gamed an imaginary brave new world where cultural accountability looks like a mandala on which the infinitely-colorful patterns of personal, community, corporate, political, and government interests wheel around a hub constructed of shared goals and justly-allocated-and-paid-for resources. 

In such a utopia of cultural accountability, admitting failure would simply be an element of progress; acknowledging the brutality and injustices of the past would be prerequisite for present and future success; contrary opinions would be sought and valued; dissention would not mean dislike and would be relied on as a valuable check on poor or hasty planning. In my imagination's travels in the universe of cultural accountability, inclusivity would be organic, not legislated or adjudicated. 

The dream goes far beyond those examples, but, in the end, it is still a dream. But does it have to be just a fanciful imagining, or is it possible to at least begin moving toward such a culture of accountability? 

The trick is how to reach the hardened hearts and porous brains of the who-cares?, mind-your-own-business, and not-in-my-backyard segments of our population. No one is saying it will be an easy lift. If getting Covid-19 vaccine into the arms of that large minority of the American public is a struggle, getting cultural understanding into the minds of the unwilling and uncaring will either be Herculean or Sisyphean. 

But, it will be neither of those, nor anything else, if we do not make a start.