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A review by neilrcoulter
Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books by Philip Nel
3.0
The five chapters (and conclusion) of Philip Nel’s Was the Cat in the Hat Black? don’t connect into one book very well, and sometimes something in one chapter contradicts something in an earlier chapter. So I find it a difficult book to rate as-a-book. I enjoyed some of it and really didn’t enjoy some of it. As a reader and parent who is very enthusiastic about good, honest, meaningful communication across cultures and subcultures, I am completely interested in Nel’s topic of bringing more diversity into children’s literature, and I opened the book eager to learn. Reading with that attitude, I found much to ponder in the book. However, it takes a long time to get to the best parts.
The first three chapters are where Nel is on the shakiest ground. The first chapter looks at the works of Dr. Seuss, and especially The Cat in the Hat. The reader wants to know: Was the Cat in the Hat black? Nel’s answer: Yes! No. Maybe? It depends... Every bold assertion Nel makes is followed by a paragraph or two of hedging and backtracking, which results in weak, ambiguous conclusions. There is, as Nel points out, definitely evidence of racially insensitive artwork throughout Seuss’s corpus (even while Seuss was at the same time promoting anti-racism in other works)—and Random House has recently taken several titles with that questionable imagery out of print, which is fine—but The Cat in the Hat ...I just don’t see it as a racist text, even after Nel’s chapter. He writes:
In Chapter 2, Nel explores ways in which obviously racial content in some books was altered in later editions of the books—in particular, Doctor Dolittle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Mary Poppins. The content in this chapter gets somewhat repetitive. The only one of those three books I have any connection to is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book which I love and which I’ve always been comfortable regarding as a very unsettling story. I think changing the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies to a fictional people was a good revision, because it leaves intact the disturbing idea that Willy Wonka uses people so flippantly, but it allows the Oompa-Loompas to stand in for any and all oppressed people. Wonka is not a normative, be-more-like-him kind of character. He’s only sentimental and cuddly in the end of the original film version, and that was a completely wrong characterization. Johnny Depp’s version of the character is more correct in emphasizing the strangeness and inappropriateness; in the conclusion of that film, Wonka is awkwardly domesticated—with emphasis more on “awkward” than “domesticated.”
Chapter 3 returns to picture books (one of the odd things about this book is that it shifts from picture books to children’s chapter books to young adult literature, of all eras), this time focusing on William Joyce, and especially the racial erasure evident in his book/app/film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I’m not familiar with this story in any of its incarnations, but I know some of Joyce’s other books. If Morris Lessmore really is meant to be about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, then I agree that it’s weird to show only white people, and also a bit distasteful to suggest that the answer to everyone’s problems is just to read from a narrow selection of books.
However, Nel’s research approach in this chapter bothered me. He (repeatedly) affirms how terrible it is that the library Joyce presents in the story includes only books by dead White people. But it’s not the “dead” part that’s an issue, it seems, because William Joyce is, in fact, a live White person, and yet Nel made no attempt to actually call, write, or interview him about the accusations he makes in this chapter. Joyce lives less than a ten-hour drive away from Nel—what’s Nel’s reason for leaving him out of a highly critical chapter that’s all about him? Instead, Nel snipes at him from the safe distance of tenured academia. It’s at least lazy, if not immature and cowardly.
Chapter 4 was my favorite of the book. I love book cover illustrations, and in this chapter Nel looks at the ways book covers have tended to be “whitewashed”—that is, even when the novel’s protagonist is non-White, the book cover is likely to show either a White model, a person in silhouette, or more abstract imagery with no person at all. In this chapter, the evidence presented is so much clearer and more reasonable. By dealing with things that are happening in publishing right now, rather than a picture book from the 1950s, Nel is able to address real problems in publishing that can be fixed. I hope that in the years since this book, the amount of book cover whitewashing has been reduced (and I think that’s the case, but I don’t have numbers to supplement the data Nel provides from 2014). It seemed a little odd to me that Nel criticized the process of “White authentication”—where a work by a non-White author is introduced by a White author, as if to reassure the reader that it’s all right, you can trust me, this really is worth reading. Ok, I don’t disagree with the criticism, but...I’m reading a book by a White author assuring me that it’s all right, I can trust him, it’s good to read more diverse books. Can we acknowledge the irony, at least? Nel doesn’t.
The final chapter and the conclusion make a compelling case for more racial diversity in children’s literature. It definitely made me want to seek out more books that take me outside of my own subculture and experiences. Nel offers a number of suggestions for improving the situation of diversity in publishing, but I often felt helpless—like, so I care about this, but what can I do, really? I’d love to work in publishing, but I’ve found no open doors no matter how much I’ve knocked; and I buy almost no new fiction of any kind, so my dollars aren’t casting votes one way or the other. I have some influence within my family, a minuscule influence among friends, and even smaller influence among the four people who ever notice what I do on Goodreads. So the prospect of affecting decisions made by top-tier publishers in NYC seems laughably remote to me. I do resonate, therefore, with Nel’s assertion that one of the most important aspects of reading well is being guided by wise parents and teachers:
While I affirm most of Nel’s suggestions for improving diversity in publishing, he sometimes proposes something that strikes me as nearly humorous. For instance, when he writes,
My overall impression of Was the Cat in the Hat Black? is that it presents a confused concept of racism. Nel says on page 1 that “racism endures because racism is structural: it’s embedded in culture, and in institutions.” I disagree—and interestingly, so does Nel later in the book, when he cites a 2015 Pew Research study that found that three-fourths of all people demonstrate racial bias. As the study reported,
The first three chapters are where Nel is on the shakiest ground. The first chapter looks at the works of Dr. Seuss, and especially The Cat in the Hat. The reader wants to know: Was the Cat in the Hat black? Nel’s answer: Yes! No. Maybe? It depends... Every bold assertion Nel makes is followed by a paragraph or two of hedging and backtracking, which results in weak, ambiguous conclusions. There is, as Nel points out, definitely evidence of racially insensitive artwork throughout Seuss’s corpus (even while Seuss was at the same time promoting anti-racism in other works)—and Random House has recently taken several titles with that questionable imagery out of print, which is fine—but The Cat in the Hat ...I just don’t see it as a racist text, even after Nel’s chapter. He writes:
However, read a second way, the Cat’s performance fails to conceal the threat of violence. Not just a smiling song-and-dance man (or cat), the Cat in the Hat embodies unrest: he unsettles the social order, bending the rake, scaring the fish, and unleashing two Things who both knock the wind out of Sally and knock over a vase, lamp, books, and dishes. In his subversive aspect, the Cat evokes media images of violence associated with the civil rights movement. Though he is initiating the violence (rather than practicing nonviolent civil disobedience and receiving a violent response from Whites), his disruptive presence serves as a reminder of African Americans’ struggle for human rights. He is entertainer, warning, and provocateur. (44)I’m willing (probably more than most people) to read a lot into a text, and I don’t disagree at all that the Cat is a potentially dangerous agent of chaos. But really—does anyone read The Cat in the Hat and think about the civil rights movement? As Nel says, “there is no record of readers in 1957 interpreting the Cat in racial terms,” and I’ve never heard that interpretation in my lifetime, so maybe in addition to investigating the possible historically race-related influences on the character, we also need to consider the ways that the relationship between a sign and the signified changes over time, to the point that any connection to an earlier signified is nullified. That certainly seems to me to be the case for The Cat in the Hat.
In Chapter 2, Nel explores ways in which obviously racial content in some books was altered in later editions of the books—in particular, Doctor Dolittle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Mary Poppins. The content in this chapter gets somewhat repetitive. The only one of those three books I have any connection to is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a book which I love and which I’ve always been comfortable regarding as a very unsettling story. I think changing the Oompa-Loompas from African pygmies to a fictional people was a good revision, because it leaves intact the disturbing idea that Willy Wonka uses people so flippantly, but it allows the Oompa-Loompas to stand in for any and all oppressed people. Wonka is not a normative, be-more-like-him kind of character. He’s only sentimental and cuddly in the end of the original film version, and that was a completely wrong characterization. Johnny Depp’s version of the character is more correct in emphasizing the strangeness and inappropriateness; in the conclusion of that film, Wonka is awkwardly domesticated—with emphasis more on “awkward” than “domesticated.”
Chapter 3 returns to picture books (one of the odd things about this book is that it shifts from picture books to children’s chapter books to young adult literature, of all eras), this time focusing on William Joyce, and especially the racial erasure evident in his book/app/film The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I’m not familiar with this story in any of its incarnations, but I know some of Joyce’s other books. If Morris Lessmore really is meant to be about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, then I agree that it’s weird to show only white people, and also a bit distasteful to suggest that the answer to everyone’s problems is just to read from a narrow selection of books.
However, Nel’s research approach in this chapter bothered me. He (repeatedly) affirms how terrible it is that the library Joyce presents in the story includes only books by dead White people. But it’s not the “dead” part that’s an issue, it seems, because William Joyce is, in fact, a live White person, and yet Nel made no attempt to actually call, write, or interview him about the accusations he makes in this chapter. Joyce lives less than a ten-hour drive away from Nel—what’s Nel’s reason for leaving him out of a highly critical chapter that’s all about him? Instead, Nel snipes at him from the safe distance of tenured academia. It’s at least lazy, if not immature and cowardly.
Chapter 4 was my favorite of the book. I love book cover illustrations, and in this chapter Nel looks at the ways book covers have tended to be “whitewashed”—that is, even when the novel’s protagonist is non-White, the book cover is likely to show either a White model, a person in silhouette, or more abstract imagery with no person at all. In this chapter, the evidence presented is so much clearer and more reasonable. By dealing with things that are happening in publishing right now, rather than a picture book from the 1950s, Nel is able to address real problems in publishing that can be fixed. I hope that in the years since this book, the amount of book cover whitewashing has been reduced (and I think that’s the case, but I don’t have numbers to supplement the data Nel provides from 2014). It seemed a little odd to me that Nel criticized the process of “White authentication”—where a work by a non-White author is introduced by a White author, as if to reassure the reader that it’s all right, you can trust me, this really is worth reading. Ok, I don’t disagree with the criticism, but...I’m reading a book by a White author assuring me that it’s all right, I can trust him, it’s good to read more diverse books. Can we acknowledge the irony, at least? Nel doesn’t.
The final chapter and the conclusion make a compelling case for more racial diversity in children’s literature. It definitely made me want to seek out more books that take me outside of my own subculture and experiences. Nel offers a number of suggestions for improving the situation of diversity in publishing, but I often felt helpless—like, so I care about this, but what can I do, really? I’d love to work in publishing, but I’ve found no open doors no matter how much I’ve knocked; and I buy almost no new fiction of any kind, so my dollars aren’t casting votes one way or the other. I have some influence within my family, a minuscule influence among friends, and even smaller influence among the four people who ever notice what I do on Goodreads. So the prospect of affecting decisions made by top-tier publishers in NYC seems laughably remote to me. I do resonate, therefore, with Nel’s assertion that one of the most important aspects of reading well is being guided by wise parents and teachers:
That said, books offering a critical examination of racism’s cruelty are (obviously) quite different from those that passively perpetuate racism. The intervention of a thoughtful adult will be vital in reading the latter type of book. Un-bowdlerized versions of these books require guidance, critical questions, and emotional support for the strong feelings that they may elicit. They must also be read in the context of other books that (a) offer affirmative images of racial group members, and (b) supply some of the necessary history that will help young readers make sense of the structures of racism. (99–100)That’s what I’ve always tried to provide for my kids (despite Adam Swift’s delightfully ridiculous assertion that I should occasionally feel bad about reading to my kids, because of the unfair advantage this gives them over kids who weren’t read to).
While I affirm most of Nel’s suggestions for improving diversity in publishing, he sometimes proposes something that strikes me as nearly humorous. For instance, when he writes,
There are few novels or picture books about Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise, there are few about the prison industrial complex, or racist profiling (192).Wait a minute. You’re telling me that when you think back to snuggling on the sofa with your three-year-old as you read a big stack of books together, that’s the moment when you’d like to have a discussion about the prison industrial complex, via a picture book? Come on.
My overall impression of Was the Cat in the Hat Black? is that it presents a confused concept of racism. Nel says on page 1 that “racism endures because racism is structural: it’s embedded in culture, and in institutions.” I disagree—and interestingly, so does Nel later in the book, when he cites a 2015 Pew Research study that found that three-fourths of all people demonstrate racial bias. As the study reported,
Roughly equal levels of implicit racial bias were found among men and women, old and young, and college educated and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling. Republicans and Democrats with the same racial background also had similar levels of underlying racial bias.“If there are racial biases in your work,” Nel writes, “then you are statistically normal” (133). This I agree with. Looking back through history, you easily find that all people across all eras and regions of the world seem to want to draw lines between “insider” and “outsider,” “us” and “them.” So racism doesn’t come from social and cultural structures; it comes from something deep within all of us, something that has to be addressed, fixed, forgiven, in every generation. Changing the structures to be fairer and more equal is an excellent endeavor, but it can’t end racism. It’s addressing the effects, not the root problem. Beyond the tenets of “white fragility” (which I don’t wholeheartedly endorse) and the good work for fairness and justice in society, we have to look deeper, at the darkness in our hearts that can so quickly motivate any of us to unloving actions. A fellow who spent time walking around Israel some years ago has answers to those deeper issues.