Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 140

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Popular Culture Review

Sneetches. The unpopularity of the Plain-Belly Sneetches, on whom unfairness
and all sorts of evils could be blamed, with impunity - and where they were
sporadically persecuted and personally restricted - was quite evident in the out
landish story. For instance, Dr. Seuss (1989, p.7) explains:
When the Star-Belly Sneetches had frankfurter roasts
Or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts.
They never invited the Plain-Belly Sneetches.
They left them out cold, in the dark of the beaches.
They kept the away. Never let them come near.
And that’s how they treated them year after year.
Although contact has been made among the races in the United States to
a certain degree through the painful process of integration - to reduce elements
of prejudice and discrimination, especially in establishing common, nationalis
tic goals - it is through political socialization and improper learning that we
reject our fellow brethren, like the Plain-Belly Sneetches’ repudiation by the
Star-Belly Sneetches. And this attitude became prevalent and incorporated into
their Sneetch-Beach society.
Moreover, indirect personal or tactile contact between the Sneetches like in human society - was not effective in reducing the Star-Belly Sneetches
prejudices, as they continued to discriminate against the Plain-Belly Sneetches.
Additionally, some iconoclastic scholars have claimed that racism, prejudices,
and discrimination are permanent. For example. Professor Derrick Bell (1992,
p.l2), in support of this thesis has written:
Minorities will never gain full equality in the country. Even those
herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more that
temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived victories that slide into
irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white
dominance. This is a hard-to -accept fact that all history verifies.
We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act
of ultimate defiance.
If Bell’s dire assertions are correct, attempts to chronicle or explain the
motivation of those who hate and perpetuate our racial problems are critically
important. Dr. Seuss’ thesis regarding the Sneetched must be examined, and con
sidered, if for no other reason than to explain how children or the offspring from
adults can learn this same kind of destructive and counter-productive behavior
over successive generations.