On Tuesday, President Joe Biden refused to mention world-renown children’s book author, Dr. Seuss during his presentation on National Read Across America Day which promotes story-time to children. It was a strange omission because the day was initially created as a celebration of Theodore Geisel’s, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Biden omitted Dr. Seuss because the people controlling Joe Biden have deemed Dr. Seuss racist. The Dr. Seuss Foundation has also stopped publishing six Dr. Seuss books because of so-called racial images in those books. If you have read any of Dr. Seuss’ books, you will quickly realize that Theodore Geisel was anything but a racist. The messages in his books were ones of overwhelming inclusion, and anti-prejudice, not exclusion and racism.
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? teaches children to be grateful for their lives, and to be optimistic about life. “You oughta be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the people and places, you’re lucky you’re not.” These are lessons that many of the people who want to destroy our culture and tear down America need to learn desperately.
Happy Birthday to You! teaches children to celebrate who they are, their uniqueness. “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” It promotes embracing your individuality, your distinctness, who you are. It is a message for the individual that directly contradicts the ideologies promoted by proponents of group identity and identity politics.
Horton Hears a Who believes that the size of a person does not define the person’s humanity. It is a lesson that the people at Planned Parenthood and pro-abortion activists have yet to learn. Even though that message was not intended to be an anti-abortion message, it is can easily be applied to abortion because one of the pro-abortion justifications for abortion is the lack of size of the fetus gives another person the right to kill it. “A person’s a person, no matter how small! And you very small persons will not have to die, if you make yourselves heard! So come on, now, and TRY!”
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is not only as story of anti-materialism and the true meaning of Christmas, but also one of forgiveness and redemption. The Who’s allowed the Grinch, the person who hours before tried to steal their Christmas, to carve the holiday roast beast, and celebrate Christmas with them because they saw that “the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.” People can, in fact, have a change in heart and be forgiven. A shocking lesson that the champions of cancel culture have refused to learn.
In his book, The Sneetches, Dr. Seuss takes on racism and judging people based on their outward physical appearance. In this case, the physical differences were whether a Sneetch had a star on his belly or not.
"until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew whether this one was that one or that one was this one or which one was what one or what one was who." It is more important who you are on the inside than what you look like on the outside. This is the same message that Dr. Martin Luther King jr. stood up for when he said that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A message that many of the champions of identity politics have failed to understand.
Yertle the Turtle, is an anti-authoritarian story that promotes individual human rights, again a book that many people on the left who are promoting this totalitarian banning of books and cancel culture need to read. “And the fools that I saw were none other than you, who seem to have nothing else better to do than sit here and argue who’s better than who!” The fools are those in our society who think they are so much better then everyone else they can cancel others they deem not as good as they. And today as in the book, the people have the right to say, “I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights”.
So, it is clear by the content of Dr. Seuss’ books, that Theodore Geisel was not a racist. But you know who are racists in our society? The people who promote the concept of “White Privilege”. These people purport to know everything about another person based solely on the color of their skin. By their philosophical standards, they will claim that a white single mother living on food stamps is more privileged in our society than LeBron James or Jaden Smith.
You know who else is a racist? The people who subscribe to the concept of “White Fragility”. These people tell white people that they are not allowed to speak up for themselves, or defend themselves against accusations of racism simply because they are white. They tell white people they have to shut-up and take it because of the color of their skin. These people will say my calling out white fragility is a sign of my white fragility, and I should be quiet and accept the false judgement of people I don’t know based on the color of my skin.
You know who else is a racist? White people who feel compelled to apologize to the world not for something they actually did, but for the mere fact that they were born white. Not only are they apologizing for themselves, but in essence, they are apologizing for and dismissing their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, their entire ancestry because they were white, and they are responsible for them being born.
You know who are the real racists in our society? The proponents of “Critical Race Theory”. They are promoting the teaching in our schools and colleges a theory that claims that skin color is the most defining characteristic of a person, not their character, not their intelligence, not their abilities, not their goodness, kindness, generosity, selflessness, no. Those things are irrelevant compared to skin color.
Speaking of banning books and canceling people, you know who also is a racist? Amazon. They took down the video documentary of black Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” during black history month. Amazon deemed he is not black enough to be included in black history month because he says things like, “To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.” And “I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.”
So, Jeff Bezos, a white billionaire, is telling Clarence Thomas, who grew up in the segregated south, a descendent of slaves, that he is not black enough because he does not toe the black party line when he says things like, “Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow, we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.”
Clearance Thomas sees how all these so-called “anti-racism” and “equity” initiatives are not intended to free people from the shackles of racism, but to create grounds to suppress people within the confines of their race. He believes, “there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.”
People like Jeff Bezos must cancel Clarence Thomas not solely because he is a conservative, but mainly because he sees right through the liberal elites like Bezos when he says, “I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.” Justice Thomas asserts that “the absolute worst I have ever been treated, the worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, are by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.” And one of those “northern liberal elites” is no other than our current President who executed a “high-tech lynching” on Justice Thomas during his confirmation hearing on October 11, 1991. The same President who canceled Dr. Suess on false charges of racism treated Clarence Thomas worse than the KKK.
Like Theodore Gisele, Clearance Thomas knows exactly who the real racists in our society are. He spells it out clearly in plain language as much as Dr. Suess does in lyrical story-telling, but both messages are the same, and that’s why Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos and the liberal elites must cancel both of them because they expose the racism of the left.
As Dr. Seuss wrote in The Lorax, “A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.” The United States of America right now is leaning heavily to the left, and we are on the verge of falling over due to the racial prejudices that the left is promoting. The people who are hell-bent on cancelling Dr. Seuss and Clarence Thomas, and replacing them with Critical Race Theory should put down the books on “white fragility” and “white privilege”, and open up a book by Dr. Seuss or watch the documentary on Clarence Thomas, they may learn something about combatting real racism and prejudice. They may in fact learn something about humanity.
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Judd Garrett is a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He is a frequent contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.