Dr. Seuss's classic short story"The Sneetches" is one of my kids' favorites at bedtime. It could be that it's part of a larger book and can delay the inevitable for another 15 minutes, but I prefer to think it's because the story has appeal. It's got to have legs if I'm still reading it more than 50 years after it was first written, right?
For anyone that may not be familiar with the story, I'll give a brief summary. The Sneetches are a group of tall yellow Seussians that come in two varieties: star-belly and plain-belly. On the basis of this single characteristic, the star-bellies determine that they are superior (a notion that the plain-bellies inexplicably buy into), and immediately begin to limit access to their society. Sound familiar? The moment that I started to look for larger meanings in the story, I began ascribing symbolism to the various characters. There is a divisive little fellow named Sylvester McMonkey McBean who shows up to exploit the division in Sneetch society and profit from it. It's tempting to think of him as the person or group most culpable for racism in American society today (whoever you think that might be), but there is more to McBean than first meets the eye. The Sneetches themselves seem to represent different ethnicities, nationalities, socio-economic classes, or even sexual orientations. Basically, they represent the many ways in which we divide ourselves. These symbols are not exactly subtle, and don't require much deep thinking. But my mind sometimes wanders down strange roads while my hands are busy working. One of those paths is what this post is about.
There are a few aspects of this story that didn't sit right with me. I know, it's ridiculous to be pointing out plot holes in a children's story, but I don't think these are plot holes. I'm starting to think they may be the point of the story. The first one is this: McBean brings two machines to the beach, the star-on and the star-off machines. He invites the plain-bellies into the star-on machine, and then when the star-bellies become predictably concerned with their loss of distinction, he invites them into the star-off machine. This ends up causing a big mess wherein nobody can really tell who started out as what. The Sneetches, to their credit, learn from this that a physical characteristic is a poor basis for social distinction, and become a more egalitarian society. But here's what bothers me about this. Why were they confused even a little bit about who used to be a star-belly and who used to be a plain-belly?
Seuss gives us the impression that Sneetch society is a fairly small group of individuals in which you might assume that everyone knows everyone else. But the evidence suggests that this is not the case. If it were so, changing a single physical characteristic would not lead to identity confusion. But it does. So we must conclude that these Sneetches don't really know each other at all. And it would seem that they didn't want to know each other. It was enough for them that they knew who was like them and who was not. When they couldn't tell that anymore, they had to get to know each other and be more inclusive.
So what seemed like a glaring plot-hole may actually be the main crux of the story. Racism and other forms of discrimination are dependent on stereotypes and a lack of personal association. And when we get to know someone personally, we tend to think of them as somehow separate from the stereotype they used to belong to in our minds. Have you ever heard someone make a blanket statement about some group of people only to realize that one of those people is present? Like when Kelly Osbourne made derogatory comments about Latinos in the company of Rosy Perez. Kelly, evidently, didn't think of Rosy as part of that stereotypical group, but Rosy had different feelings about it.
The second problem that sticks in my mind is this: McBean clearly profited from the divisions in
McBean is perpetuating the status quo, but in the story as told by Seuss, he isn't responsible for the divisions in the first place, the Sneetches are. We have no evidence that McBean told the Sneetches that star-bellies are desirable and that plain-bellies are not. The Sneetches made some horrible decisions about themselves long before McBean came on the scene, and they unwound those decisions after he had gone. So McBean is nothing more than a prop. He's not to blame, nor does he deserve any credit.
So what conclusions can we draw from these observations? I'll suggest two, though I suspect there is a fair bit more insight lurking in there. The next time I am clearing weeds from the electric fence or moving hogs to a new pasture, I'll see if anything else strikes me. For now, I have these:
1) Racism and discrimination exist because we believe things that are not true about people we do not know. When we get to know them personally, we no longer believe those untruths about them, even if we continue to believe them about those we still do not know.
2) The media, politicians, taste-makers, and artists are not responsible for our racism and discrimination, we are. Thus the solution lies with ourselves. We, like the Sneetches, must not blame McBean, but we must change in spite of him.
Am I thinking too deeply about this, or am I on to something?
