Defending Dr. Suess

These days, calling people racist is all the rage. And no wonder, since so many of us of were raised reading books by Dr. Suess. Recently some Seuss classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of color. One example given: In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes and carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice. This is clearly racist, right?

Wrong. I learned that China has the highest rice consumption in the world, consuming over 142 million metric tons in year 2017/2018, and this figure was expected to increase in the following years. To eat all that rice, 45 billion pairs of chopsticks are produced yearly in China, requiring 25 million fully grown trees every year. 

As for the "two lines for eyes," people from many Asian countries who have Chinese ancestry are very easy to recognize. "Upper eyelid morphology is the most obvious part in the face that contributes to this fact. The unique characteristics are as follows: The upper eyelid crease is not as apparent as the crease of a Caucasian eye; the palpebral fissure is narrower and gives the look of slit-like eyes." 
-- Kidakorn Kiranantawat, Department of Surgery, Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand

I'd say it's not unusual to see a Chinese person eating a bowl of rice with chopsticks, and from a distance their eyes might look more like lines than say, round circles. It seems that Dr. Suess was right on the money and everyone should just take a deep breath and relax.