Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype (Part Two)

Santa and Rudolph in Videocraft International's 1964 stop-motion Christmas special

Three years ago today, I wrote an essay entitled Rudolph the Dog-Earred Stereotype, claiming that the Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a call to action against Hitler. It went largely unnoticed at the time. Last week, I linked that essay on a popular meme-sharing group on Facebook, and it exploded. In under eighteen hours, it received three times as many hits as it received in the previous three years.

It also received several comments, many of them hostile. Nothing energizes Netizens more than having their opinions challenged, and apparently that’s what I did. The objections fall into three basic categories, which I will address in no particular order. Here goes.

• “Santa isn't enabling ablism, he's enabling antisemitism isn't the defense I think it was meant to be”

I never said Santa was enabling antisemitism, I said America in 1939 was enabling antisemitism, and Robert L. May, Rudolph’s creator, was calling on America to take a stand. Moreover, America definitely enabled antisemitism; the same year May wrote the first Rudolph coloring book on contract for Montgomery Ward, America turned away a shipful of German Jewish refugees, most of whom eventually wound up in Germany’s Holocaust camps.

It bears emphasizing that bigotry seldom begins at ground level. Scholars of race, history, and law, like Ibram X. Kendi and Michelle Alexander have demonstrated that bigotry doesn’t cause discriminatory policies, but rather, discriminatory policies cause bigotry. If “all of the other reindeer” were mocking and excluding Rudolph, it was because Santa, atop the North Pole power pyramid, created that environment. Thus it was on Santa to change it.

If audiences limit ourselves to reading art on the surface, we always miss the meaning. Yes, superficially, Santa encouraged bigotry against Rudolph. But Santa isn’t just Santa, he stands for powerful people everywhere: heads of state, religious leaders, media figures deciding which stories deserve reporting. Storyteller Robert L. May wanted these powerful people to change their harmful policies, hopefully before that catastrophic “foggy Christmas Eve.”

• “This is fuckin [sic] dumb. Why not write a book for adults who might actually get the point (if that was actually the case)”

I dunno, man, why do any authors ever write about important topics for children? Why did Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time address spiritual malaise in a technological age? Why did Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain deal with World War II issues in a medieval Welsh setting? Why did Suzanne Collins deal with economic inequality, climate change, and resistance to unjust authority in The Hunger Games?

Perhaps because children, from an early age, demonstrate a strong sense of morality and fairness. If we’ve learned nothing from the last two years, we surely agree that adults perform elaborate moral contortions in order to defend selfish interests while still thinking of themselves as good people. We’ve watched grown-ups use religion, pseudoscience, and a truncated form of history to justify racism, closed-door nationalism, and spreading a plague unchecked.

Children, historically, have used their innate sense of justice to goad adults into right actions. As Elizabeth Hinton writes, many acts of resistance to institutional racism during the peak Civil Rights Movement began in high schools and colleges. Media pundits and defenders of the status quo still use the stereotypical college liberal as their catch-all demon, because youth have strong moral codes, undistorted by economic pressures and adult cynicism.

This doesn’t mean children always know, or do, the right thing. On the small scale, grade-school students already show hostility to people groups whom adults around them shun or belittle. On the large scale, historian Jill Lepore records how some late hippie-era college activism crossed the line into light-beer Stalinism. That’s why children should read literature with a strong moral backbone, to help steer and modulate their instinct toward fairness.

• “tl;dr”

That’s on you, dude. Most of my blog essays run 750 words, which anyone with a healthy attention span should be able to read in about three minutes. I keep things brief because screen reading attenuates people’s willingness to stick with long or detailed content. As the above arguments indicate, I didn’t explain important points in enough detail; believe me, I could go much, much longer than I usually do.

In conclusion, I don’t expect my essays to change people’s deeply entrenched beliefs. Readers will often respond to challenged beliefs much like they’d respond to someone attempting to chop off their arm. But I do expect mature audiences to read what I said, not what they wish I said.