by Rebecca Armstrong
I was standing at the register the other day, and, as I sometimes do, picked up the nearest book. It happened to be Little Miss Whoops. It’s small. While standing there, I read the whole thing. And then, I got to the end. Inside the back cover, as one might expect, is the copyright for the series. Two big circles with huge grins and legs, one bald and one with pigtails and freckles, stand over the words MR. MEN and LITTLE MISS. Under that it says “Mr. Men and Little Miss ™ and C THOIP (a chorion company)”.
For an instant my head filled with steam. I grumbled at the gender disparity. MR. versus LITTLE MISS!? Are you kidding? Then I looked to where I had found the book. Mr. Busy was there too. Hmmm. Whoops versus Busy, I thought. Incompetent (female) versus over-competent (male). Grrrrr.
I decided to do a little comparison. On the back of the books are gender specific lists of other characters in the series. Were all the Little Misses incompetence-based, and all the Misters competence-based? I wanted to know. I hoped to be pleasantly surprised.
Instead, what I discovered was more disturbing than I could have imagined. I read through the whole first row of men (tickle, greedy, happy, nosey, sneeze, bump, snow, messy, topsy-turvy, silly) and got to the second row.
Now, a little visual background, in case you’re not familiar with the series. The Misters are mostly brightly colored bald blobs, sometimes with hats, less often with shoes. They’re orange, yellow, green, blue, magenta, purple.
And, on line two, brown. The Mister most like the color of a person, a lovely dark brown color, has a very disturbing name. Mr. Uppity. He’s grinning, and wearing a top hat. I nearly fainted. I fumed. Racism, like sexism, is ubiquitous, and often disturbingly blatant. But Mr. Uppity? I was and am appalled that in the over thirty years this series has been in print, not one editor, not one publicist, not one designer, has noticed that right on line two on the back of the MR. MEN series, there is, among the rainbow of Mr. Daydreams and Mr. Happys, a caricature that would be completely at home in the racist propaganda of a century ago.
It gets even worse. Hang on here.
I shared my shock and fury with a co-worker. “Look at this! Can you believe it!” She took the book from my hands, also shocked, and, being more generous and less pessimistic, tried to find a way that this glaring example of racism could be somehow mitigated. Something, anything, would reveal itself to make this better. Ah-ha! The price sticker was covering the last character. Maybe, just maybe….
Nope. No mitigation or softening here. Under the price sticker, the last character is Mr. Good. He’s white.
It seems that Mr. Uppity is not, thankfully, the most available of the Mr. Men books. I searched for him on both the Penguin Young Readers site and the Mr. Men website. Also, Mr. Good appears only on some, not all, of the Mr. Men covers. I haven’t yet found one without Mr. Uppity on it, however. And though a search for the title Mr. Uppity didn’t turn up his own book, the Mr. Men appear regularly in each other’s books, like a little community. They help each other out, spill things on one another’s furniture, play pranks on each other. Perhaps, in his story, Mr. Good tells Mr. Uppity how to behave properly, how to be more like him.
I was so enraged and distracted by the racism that I forgot about the sexism which had originally inspired my scrutiny. I looked again. The gender disparity is not just in the titles but throughout. The Little Misses are mostly gender-coded female—giggles, helpful, ditzy, fickle, scatterbrain, bossy. The men are clever, busy, brave, rude, perfect, tall, quiet. And, of course, Uppity or Good.
Though I always thought these familiar square books were bright and innocuous, I’ve now changed my mind. They’re yet one more vehicle for the confusion that we pass down, hopefully in ever-lesser degree, generation to generation. I would think twice before I read these to a kid.
