On Dr Seuss and WAP

When I was a kid, I loved reading Dr. Seuss. I didn’t read all of his books, but the ones I did have, I remember reading over and over and over. I knew The Cat in the Hat well, but I think I liked One Fish, Two Fish even more. Probably my favorite, though, was The Sleep Book. That thing always seemed to simultaneously stimulate my imagination while relaxing me for bed. I even loved all the movies and made-for-TV things. Not just How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but the weird ones with the Grinch returning for a Who Halloween of sorts, or the original Lorax cartoon that looked like a Hanna Barbera fever dream. 

I really dug all the word play the good doctor engaged in. It seemed almost Shakespearean to little 5-year-old me, the way he just made words up for rhymes, and invented things and gave them weird names. Probably most of all, I fell in love with the poetry of his rhymes. The rhythms, the alliteration, the assonance, and the straight-up tongue twisters all tickled me and were a piece of my love of language. He used words to make me see and feel things, all while having fun with words. 

Then, when I got to be a little bit older of a kid, I loved listening to hip-hop. In reality, I was a fan from a relatively young age, in a very loose sense. I remember playing my MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice cassette tapes over and over and over. I probably drove my parents absolutely bonkers, a fact which I have come to only fully appreciate as a parent myself, subjected to an endless loop of JoJo Siwa as I now am. I can tell you all about how JoJo is going to come back like a boomerang, enjoys high top shoes, and is like a kid in a candy store. I dream in rainbows, sparkles, and gigantic bows at night now. This is what my life has come to, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me from replying whenever discussion of drama arises to clarify that you can save the drama, I just want to dance.

But, I digress (what else is new?). Hip-hop. I loved whatever hip-hop I could get my hands on as a white boy growing up in rural eastern Ohio (which is to say, not a lot in the late 1980s/early 1990s, though the Wu-Tang Clan had ties to my region, surprisingly). However, I was restricted from listening to a lot of hip-hop because of the explicit lyrics. I have really great parents who were pretty lenient about a lot of stuff because they trusted me to handle things with an intellectual maturity that surpassed my chronological age. Usually, this was rewarded with open dialogue and me feeling comfortable to ask questions about sensitive topics; every once in a while it backfired, like the time I decided to not dress up for Halloween but go trick-or-treating as a sociopathic serial killer (“because they look like every else” *evil grin*) – it was a lot of fun for them to smile sheepishly while frightened homeowners gave me extra candy to get me off their porch as fast as possible. But, one thing they did not compromise on was that they would not let me purchase an album with an explicit content sticker until I was much older than a lot of my peers who had been listening to all sorts of naughty words for years.

So, it was a banner day when I finally wore them down, sometime when I was approximately 13 or 14 years old, I think, and they let me buy a few albums with warning stickers. In fact, because I looked like I was still about 8 when I was in junior high school, I even had to have my dad make an appearance in the record store when I was ready to make my purchase, as there was no way that the store clerk was going to get busted for selling restricted merchandise to one of the little rascals. (In case you are wondering, the universe made up for this by allowing me to blossom into an awkward, scrawny kid who looked like he was 12 by the time he went to college, leaving a wake of ladies who let me “help” them with them with their term papers in exchange for meeting up at the cafeteria for what I thought was a date but was really me having lunch with them and their boyfriend – that didn’t actually happen, but the fact you likely didn’t doubt that it could have says all we need to say about that, doesn’t it?).

I still remember it to this day. I bought Life After Death by the Notorious B.I.G., more affectionately known as Biggie Smalls. It changed my life: the story telling, the lyricism, the word play, the beats so dope they’d make you break your neck while you nodded your head, the swagger and bravado, the subversiveness of using a bunch of dirty words to talk about drugs, sex, and violence. I was hooked, and thus began a love affair with the joy that is hip-hop. I would like to say that I immediately recognized it as an art form, but that would be giving young teenager me way too much credit. They said “fuck” a lot, and that’s the long and short of why I liked it initially. Over time, though, I did come to appreciate so much more about it. It really blew my mind when an older white professor in an honors English seminar my sophomore year of college suggested there truly was something artistic about good hip-hop, and drew parallels between the word play of the great poets of old and the great poets of Brooklyn, the Bronx, East Side Long Beach California, and the Dirty South. 

So, where am I going with all the wistful reminiscing? Well, it seems that today my past caught up with my present, when I saw folks lamenting that WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion is a number one song, yet Dr. Seuss is cancelled. That’s the meme, that’s the line, that’s the thing that just jumped right off the interwebs and assaulted my patience and last nerve. The weeping and gnashing of teeth among some outraged folks is visible from space, or at least it would be if it wasn’t blotted out by the much bigger joyful noise of the right-wing grifters who love to feed the outrage machine to reap the benefits. “Dr Seuss is cancelled!” “Cancel culture strikes again!” “Just when you think militant liberal leftists can’t be any worse, they go and top themselves yet again.”

Now, I know full well there are way more important things we could and should be focusing our time on. We need to get COVID relief passed before unemployment benefits run out for folks. We need to get voting rights/democracy reform passed before a bunch of state Republican legislatures make it increasingly difficult for Black people, other people of color, and marginalized folks in general to vote, or at least have their vote count meaningfully. We need to get vaccines into the arms of every person willing to get one. We need to take efforts to deal with white supremacist domestic terrorism, have a full accounting of what happened January 6, and hold every single bad actor that day responsible.

But, you know what, we also can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can contact my Representative and Senators asking them to support these things, donate to and volunteer for candidates that support these things, and generally support causes I believe in AND call out nonsense when I see it. And let me be perfectly clear – the WAP vs Dr. Seuss business is nonsense in no uncertain terms. You know it, or at least you should, I know it, and I’m going to take a moment to explain why.

Really, if ever there was a false equivalency hiding in plain sight, this would be a perfect example. Let’s just stop and ask ourselves some basic questions, shall we? If you’re a grown-up, do you do a lot of reading of Dr. Seuss during your free time, when you are not with children? It’s okay if you do; I’m not trying to shame anyone. But, I’m willing to wager that for most grown-ups, the answer to this question is “no.” When you’re not around kids, if you read, you read something meant for adults, or at least something above a second grade reading level. Similarly, when you’re on your own time as a grown person, what type of music do you listen to? JoJo Siwa? Some other teeny bopper? Or do you listen to music more in-line with grown-up tastes?

Relatedly, when you’re with school-aged kids, and it is dress like your favorite book character at school, do you expect the kids at the elementary school to dress up like their favorite character from a Stephen King or Kurt Vonnegut novel? Do you expect them to know all the lyrics to “Hypnotize” or “10 Crack Commandments” when it is time for them to play their favorite song on Alexa or YouTube? Or, would you expect them to dress up like the Cat in the Hat or Harry Potter, and to know all the lyrics to “D.R.E.A.M.?”

What do your answers to my series of rhetorical questions (you did realize they were rhetorical, right? Please tell me you didn’t attempt to comment below or on my social media with your answers.) have to do with anything? Everything. You CANNOT compare an explicit hip-hop song, written by and for adults about adult things, and a series of children’s books, some of which contain Hella racist words and imagery, and expect that I’m going to take you seriously. You’re clowning yourself, and I’m here to laugh at you. 

WAP is a number one song? Yes, and who made it one? A bunch of impressionable elementary school kids? Please. I’m not denying that some kids under the age of 10 may know the song. There have been kids who knew things beyond their years since the beginning of time. I remember the kids in my elementary school who sang “Let me lick you up and down” on the school bus. I’m not saying that’s right, but it isn’t a bunch of 5^th graders who made WAP a number one song. It’s a bunch of grown-ups who liked grown-up music. You don’t have to like it. You can prefer not to listen to sexually explicit music and find such open discussion of sex highly offensive. That’s fine, and I don’t think that makes you a bad person. But don’t pretend that elementary school libraries around the country are freely distributing Cardi and Megan to innocent school kids.

Dr. Seuss, on the other hand, has been around for kids for years. And, is some of it racist? Yes. Don’t get fooled by the hype machine coming out of the right wing media bubble. They love to contrast a picture of two women of color owning their sexuality with a picture of The Cat In The Hat. But guess what? He isn’t cancelled. A majority of Dr. Seuss books aren’t cancelled. In fact, if we’re being accurate, none of the books are cancelled. You can still obtain a copy of many of them at bookstores and libraries across the nation. They just are going to stop printing six books that have racist imagery and words in them. Taken on its own, this isn’t even anywhere near complicated. Should we take steps to reduce showing children a bunch of racist images and words in children’s books, particularly children who identify racially with these images and words and are going to internalize it? Of course. We don’t have to deny these books existed, and we can even have honest and frank discussions about them with kids as they get a little bit older and mature enough to handle them (you know, much like the concept of there being explicit content in music we want to guard children against until they’re a little older). But, there is a huge difference between suggesting that suddenly the left is trying to erase history with political correctness and what is actually happening: a company is not going to keep printing books that have pictures that are clearly racist.

And notice, it’s never the actual images and words from these books that pop up in these memes and stories. No, because showing the actual racist image of Black people drawn as savages with big lips, or similar racist caricatures of Asians, would get in the way of the imaginary points they’re trying to score for the GOP outrage machine. I’m not going to show them or link to them here, but if you’re not familiar, I challenge you to go look at them for yourself and the context they occur in within the books and ask yourself if you really cannot see something at least a tiny bit problematic. Best to loosely throw around terms like “woke mob” and “cancel culture” and pretend that a single for grown-ups that slaps and some racist references in half a dozen kids’ books are equivalent.

But they’re not. You know, for all the uproar that has surrounded hip-hop from its inception, it’s always been a matter of perspective as to how you see it. If you don’t like it because it isn’t your taste or style, that’s fine. If you try to avoid swearing or language some people might find offensive, I respect that. But, I find it quite laughable when people want to somehow blame hip-hop for all the ills in the world, as if somehow, if people stopped rapping over beats and pulled up their pants (sorry, that was the thing back in my youth, I’m not sure what the latest fashion trend is now), that suddenly Black people would then, and only then, be worthy of being seen as fully human and not “thugs” and “gangstas” and “welfare queens” and “hos,” and systemic racism would vanish. I’m just a white guy bumping bops in my minivan, but I can recognize hip-hop for what it is: art, just like anything else, no more, no less. Some art is good, some is bad, some is highbrow, some is marketed to the lowest common denominator, and beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. But make no mistake, it isn’t the cause of anything; if nothing else, it is an expression of the culture that produces it. If you’re so deeply offended by it, don’t blame the art, blame the society that produces it. Turn that pointing figure back on yourself, because you participate in the systemic injustices as much as the rest of us.

Dr. Seuss is art, too, in a sense. But it is art from a different time, and we have a choice in what art we expose our children too. There is mounds of evidence about how messages about race filter through to kids at a young age, and cultural messages all around us make a lifelong impact on kids. Children see things and internalize them as true, these things impact their understanding of the world, and we owe it to them to be careful about messages we feed their little sponge brains to soak up. If you think that WAP isn’t the kind of music to play for a group of 2^nd grades, you clearly get this concept. So, if you wouldn’t want a bunch of 7 and 8 years olds bragging about the moistness of their nether regions, why would you want them thinking that racist pictures about people of color are normal and okay? 

Did reading Dr. Seuss and listening to hip-hop make me a better or worse, a more or less racist, a more woke or more ignorant person? That’s a tough question, and I don’t know that I can give an honest answer. I can honestly say that they’re both part of my history and that I’ve learned from both of them. But, I also can say that I’m old enough to be able to stop and reflect a little to consider that maybe not all the things that I experienced growing up are the exact same things I want my kids to experience. We all want better for our own kids, right? I’m not sure exactly how I’ll approach hip-hop with explicit content when the time comes for my kids, but one thing I’m really clear on is that I want my kids to be less racist than me, and working to think critically about what books I’m providing to them and what messages those books are communicating is a part of that. 

If nothing else, joyfully, my daughter has recently started asking for Alexa to play “Can’t Touch This” on a regular basis. As we instruct an invisible class to ring the bell because school is in session, I can’t help but think the kids are going to be all right, and maybe even a little better than me. Not cooler, as I still know all the words to Ice Ice Baby, as well as some awesome dance moves, but better nevertheless.