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[JDSN]

The guy in general was pretty scummy who wrote some great children books so suddenly everyone forgot he was generally scummy human being

Wife gets cancer so he finds a healthy mistress and drives the wife to suicide so he can run off with his mistress

I did not expect this. This I did not expect.

 

[IcyBlueStrawberry]

I said goddamn.

Is nothing from my childhood what it seemed?

 

[Korigama]

Everyone knows about walt disney too right?

And Henry Ford.

 

[LiK]

it was the sign of the times.

H. P. Lovecraft was also a racist.

 

[aly]

I'm more surprised that other people are surprised about this.

 

[ReiGun]

Holy shit. That's not even a little racist. That's full tilt racism. Jeez.

 

[darscot]

This doesn't make him racist, in my opinion anyway. He was a cartoonist and this was done in very different times. He could have done it because that is what sold. I'm sure lots of people used racial slurs back then that didn't hate black people, it was just common. I'm also not saying he wasn't a racist but, would like to know a little more about the actual guy not just a single piece of his work.

 

[Chariot]

The guy in general was pretty scummy who wrote some great children books so suddenly everyone forgot he was generally scummy human being

Wife gets cancer so he finds a healthy mistress and drives the wife to suicide so he can run off with his mistress

Yeah, it's always puzzling how people comnect personality and skill. People can be utter shitheads and still incredible in various things. Heck, they are a lot of academics who are smart and posses a lot useful knowledge and abilities, but are racist and/or sexist or believe in strange shite.

Albeit I have to say, I am surprised about Ghandi. Didn't though of im as that bad. Nice that our teacher back in school forgot to mention this part when we had him. But then again, nobody in school told me either about what an ass Columbus was.

 

[lenovox1]

. . .

Long story, short: The comic doesn't suggest he was a hardboiled racist any more than any other person that used that idiom at the time.

The Japanese internment comic, frankly, does, but that's separate from my point.

 

[Lulubop]

Damn that drawing escalated quickly.

 

[weepy]

It is okay everyone. We still have H. P. Lovecraft.

Lol. I guess this is a product of the time.

 

[rhandino]

It is okay everyone. We still have H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was a xenophobe, anti-Semite and racist in general, but I guess that is your point, kii

It's fascinating how his work was heavily inspired by his racist views...

 

[RobotNinjaHornets]

Holy shit, someone was racist in the 20s?!

Seriously, people are legitimately surprised by this?

 

[GeekyDad]

Ha, ha, ha!

And guess what else, kids -- there is no Santa Claus!

Ahahahahaha!!!

 

[Mammoth Jones]

1929. I'm not shocked.

 

[Soi-Fong]

So hard to have a role model. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and now Dr. Seuss. All I have left is Mr. Rogers.

What was wrong with Mother Teresa?

 

[Chie Satonaka]

Holy shit, someone was racist in the 20s?!

Seriously, people are legitimately surprised by this?

I know it might be hard to believe that people don't think everyone is a shitbag racist, even in a time where blatant, open racism was a thing, but yeah. It can be surprising, especially when said person was responsible for pretty fond childhood memories.

I've grown out of this for the most part, but I assume people would like to think the best of people, especially when associated with said fond childhood memories.

Oh well. It's not the first time and it won't be the last.

 

[Ferrio]

What was wrong with Mother Teresa?

Short story: She liked to see people suffer.

 

[rhandino]

What was wrong with Mother Teresa?

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known as Mother Theresa gets this a lot. She's viewed by most people as a real saint, full of sweet goodness. In reality, she had many flaws. Beside other things, she regularly withheld narcotica from people who needed it because pain was just a gift from god and she used the money raised to rally against abortion and building 150 convents around the world instead of using it for the poor or building an hospital with it.

She is a VERY complex and divisive person =/

 

[Gentleman Jack]

Holy shit, someone was racist in the 20s?!

Seriously, people are legitimately surprised by this?

Not everyone accesses the same banks of information at the same time. Overt racism was prevalent 'back then' but it's not as if it's a relic of the past. The same people who would express shock at a racist getting outed in 2015 draw their shock from exactly the same place as learning someone who was born before WWI was a mean-spirited racist. The same cartoon made in 2015 might say 'pick out your perfect thug for your post-conference championship on field interview.'

 

[Soi-Fong]

Short story: She liked to see people suffer.

Did not know this... Growing up, all I heard was that... Well she was a saint..

 

[King Cobra]

Maybe I'm just desensitized to this but I'm not really surprised nor does my opinion change about him. He was someone who worked hard to become successful and him having a common perspective that many had back in that time doesn't take away from that.

 

[Afrikan]

edited- at the advice of others.

on topic though. how has his estate/family responded to this?

 

[excelsiorlef]

What was wrong with Mother Teresa?

The people she "looked after" and "cared for" lived in squalor, where their diseases got worse and worse, and they suffered and suffered with no medical care whatsoever until they died.

She had a godlike fetish for suffering.

She once said, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” in response to criticism pushed on by Hitchens. With money bountiful from her charity efforts, Mother Teresa was equipped with resources to give the ill that came from across the world for healing. Instead, she allowed their health to decline, without medicine to hinder pain, proper food, and cleanliness. Yet hypocrisy dictated that when Mother Teresa needed medical care, she received it in a hospital.

Furthermore, Mother Teresa seemed to favor the darkly wealthy while offering nothing but prayer to the poor. The study points out how she accepted honors and grants from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, a man known for the severe mistreatment of his own people while living in a bubble of luxury. When asked to return donated money from the corrupt banker Charles Keating, she remained silent and she also accepted money from Robert Maxwell, later discovered as stolen money. She had millions of dollars transferred to secret accounts to which Larivée asked once again, “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Teresa's works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?” When floods and chemical disaster hit her home of India, there were no financial relief efforts to be found.

http://mic.com/articles/28746/mother-teresa-not-a-saint-new-study-suggests-she-was-a-fraud

Volunteers such as Loudon, and Western doctors such as Robin Fox of the Lancet, wrote with shock of what they found in Teresa’s clinics. No tests were performed to determine the patients’ ailments. No modern medical equipment was available. Even people dying of cancer, suffering terrible agony, were given no painkillers other than aspirin. Needles were rinsed and reused, without proper sterilization. No one was ever sent to the hospital, even people in clear need of emergency surgery or other treatment.
...
On another occasion, Teresa told a terminal cancer patient, who was dying in extreme pain, that he should consider himself fortunate: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” (She freely related his reply, which she seemed not to realize was meant as a putdown: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.”

...
But, of course, suffering like Christ was of no benefit if the sufferer did not actually accept Christ. To this end, Teresa’s clinics were run as conversion factories. Ex-volunteers have testified that Teresa taught her followers to secretly baptize the dying – people who could not resist, or were not aware of what was happening to them – without their consent. As ex-volunteer Susan Shields wrote, “Material aid was a means of reaching their souls, of showing the poor that God loved them… Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems”.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2008/05/mother-teresa/#sthash.elVsEDYI.dpuf

She was vile.

 

[NumberTwo]

TIL I learned Dr.Seuss was racist as fuck

Yeah man. Yet another childhood figure for me ruined.

 

[Not]

Hahaha holy crap

 

[Vandova]

not surprised, still disappointing.

 

[Mr-Joker]

Well this is awkward, I used to read The Cat In Hat a lot when I was younger.

Everyone knows about walt disney too right?

And Henry Ford.

I don't, what's is their dark dirty little secret?

 

[J10]

Well this is awkward, I used to read The Cat In Hat a lot when I was younger.





I don't, what's is their dark dirty little secret?

They hated Jewish people.

 

[woolley]

A white guy was racist in the 1920's? Well I'm am shocked! Shocked I tell you. Who would've thought?

 

[Christberg]

The fact that this stuff still shocks people is interesting to me.

Racism was just as popular as classism is today, perhaps more so. It wasn't until some time in the mid 1980s that the term "racist" became a negative term.

We find these sorts of things shocking today but during the time period it was drawn this would have been considered pretty normal stuff.

 

[onadesertedisland]

Well Mr. Rogers was a good person, right? I think I will be really sad if something comes out about him being secret dirtbag.

 

[Conkersbadfurday]

H.P. Lovecraft was a terrible racist too, but damn, his stories are still pretty good.

You can separate the artist from the art, especially when said artist lived in a time when most people were racist.

Tom Cruise is a kool-aid drinking Scientologist, but I still like most of his movies.

 

[Vermillion]

There was unapologetic racism in the 1920s?

This really doesn't change my opinion of Dr. Seuss at all. I also don't condone the imagery.

Pretty much. Not even a little but shocked honestly. More surprised that people are surprised.

 

[flaxknuckles]

it's too bad GAF is too PC now a days... would love to give my opinion.

instead I'll have a nice conversation with someone else in person where it is safe.

That bait......

You should edit your comment to say nothing before you derail this thread.

Anyway, didn't know Seuss was so racist. I'm not devastated by this though because I'm long past my hero worship days. And ain't nobody taking away my Michael Jackson and R. Kelly CDs.

 

[Princess Carl]

I'd say this is actually worse, as this is blatantly saying that all the Japanese-Americans are traitors who will harm fellow Americans. It's not only offensive, it's dangerous.

The woodpile comic's gag is just literally illustrating common (at the time) expressions, even though the origin of that one expression is racist propaganda from the Civil War.


So basically at the time Seuss's woodpile comic was made, it was casual racism. When that Japanese comic was made, it was promoting a current program that imprisoned over 100,000 US citizens unjustly.

I agree

 

[temp]

I feel like one of the bad things about being black would be the way society hates you.

 

[Vermillion]

Well Mr. Rogers was a good person, right? I think I will be really sad if something comes out about him being secret dirtbag.

Brighter the light, the darker the shadow, yes?

 

[Chie Satonaka]

it's too bad GAF is too PC now a days... would love to give my opinion.

instead I'll have a nice conversation with someone else in person where it is safe.

I'm glad to hear you're so above it all, unlike this GAF individual. Way to go!

 

[*Splinter]

Yep, easy to look back and judge someone by modern standards. I think a lot of people overlook that had they been born 100 years earlier, they'd be racist too, and not even consider it an issue as society had taught them that other ethnicities were quite literally inferior.
Hell, we probably have widely accepted ideas/intolerances now that people in 100 years would look at as backwards and harmful to society.

Spoiler

(Possible example: American attitudes toward criminals)

But the wife thing? Yeah that's fucked up, what an asshole

(The Japanese comic is also significantly worse than this one, as explained by other posters)

 

[Valhelm]

That's like thirty times worse than I expected

 

[FiggyCal]

Was Dr. Seuss' mentor the guy who made Tin Tin? jesus christ

I was a huge fan of tin tin when I was growing up Haiti. I just imagine everyone was racist back then but don't really think about it.

 

[DontBeThatGuy]

Holy shit, someone was racist in the 20s?!

Seriously, people are legitimately surprised by this?

When it's someone like Dr. Seuss? Yeah, sure, and it's some blunt as fuck racism too. He went hard in 1929. I'm personally not the least bit shocked though, but people getting caught off guard isn't that far fetched.

 

[akira28]

So hard to have a role model. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and now Dr. Seuss. All I have left is Mr. Rogers.

Ah, you don't know about the hidden Rogers' cults in the mid-west back in the 80s?

And it's well known that Barney ate those kids once they got too old to be on the show.

 

[KorrZ]

1929. I'm not shocked.

That was my thought as well. Definitely a "product of your time" kind of thing.

 

[Valhelm]

I'm also surprised that he felt this way about black people, given his anti-segregation comics from the 40s and onward.

Wasn't the Sneetches basically about black people, too?

 

[BocoDragon]

^ I was just gonna say. He said some things about racial equality that we very proto-civil rights movement.

Maybe he's complex, maybe he changed over time, or maybe he was a symptom of his age despite moments of progressivism.

 

[GreekWolf]

So hard to have a role model. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and now Dr. Seuss. All I have left is Mr. Rogers.

Yeah, and the one role model who actually wasn't a racist and treated everyone with kindness, is only used as a curse word.

 

[Not]

I'm also surprised that he felt this way about black people, given his anti-segregation comics from the 40s and onward.

Wasn't the Sneetches basically about black people, too?

K so uh he changed his mind? Kinda still pissed. Those early ones aren't very redeemable

 

[Dishwalla]

Oh no, a guy known for children's entertainment turns out to have made racially insensitive materials/cartoons several decades ago. Better not let people know about Walt Disney, the guys at Warner responsible for the Looney Tunes(Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, etc), William Hanna and Joseph Barbera aka the guys behind Tom and Jerry, Tex Avery(both at WB and MGM), Walter Lanz aka the guy who did Woody Woodpecker amongst others(including what is quite possibly the most racist cartoon ever put out by a major studio), and so on.