Arguments for 'Curious George' as Racist

A beloved childhood picture book series with a legacy that has withstood seventy years of technological and social evolutions, H.A. and Margaret Rey’s 1941 Curious George, despite its blatant negative racial connotations and depictions, has remained a classic in the hyper-sensitive, highly-censored environment constructed for children. The series has spawned countless spin-offs and adaptations as a separate book series, television show, movie franchise, and video game, a classic which the media continues to revamp and reutilize in order to engage children and their parents as consumers. While in many ways the Curious George series proves to be the perfect childhood companion with its inquisitive protagonist and entertaining shenanigans, the earlier books in the series prove problematic with their overt references to the abduction and forced enslavement of Africans during the slave trade and their glorification of the Man with the Yellow Hat who is celebrated as a friend and protector rather than condemned as a captor and oppressor. The series’ celebration of the oppression of an abducted monkey parallels the oppression of black Americans, making the books’ fame seemingly contradictory to the atmosphere of innocence in which modern society has deemed it necessary for children to appropriately and healthily develop. While scholars such as professor June Cummins have addressed the books’ ties to racist propaganda and negative depictions of blacks, none have explained the books’ continued popularity despite a world increasingly aware of the problematic nature in which people of color are depicted in older literature. The Curious George series still remains such a prominent and popular American childhood classic as it is able to perpetrate the social and racial subordination associated with childhood innocence through the power dynamics established between the Man with the Yellow Hat and George. Additionally, the commercialization of the series allows the stories and their characters to remain iconic without the need to directly engage with the original text while still supporting the original books’ assertions regarding white supremacy by avoiding discussion of their problematic nature.