Book banning is back in the news. No better way to distract everyone from inflation, no orange juice in the grocery store, and rising COVID numbers again than a bunch of news stories about what students in a small Tennessee school district will be made to read as part of their curriculum.
Briefly, the McMinn County School Board voted last month to remove the comic book Maus from the middle school curriculum and libraries due to objections over profanity and nudity depicted in the book. Some have interpreted the banning of the book to “actually” be about preventing kids from learning about Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. Maus is author Art Spiegelman’s retelling of his father’s experiences–with Jews represented by mice, Nazis by cats, Americans by dogs, Poles as pigs, and other nationalities and races depicted by various other creatures. It won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
The book has a complicated history with the Jewish community itself. Some Holocaust survivors found the use of animals to represent different groups as playing right into the Nazi assertion that Jews were a “different species”. Others considered the entire premise as “dehumanizing” the tragedy. Poles–as you might expect–are not happy about being depicted as pigs. Regardless, almost everyone now is upset because an elected school board acted in an official capacity to tell children what they should and shouldn’t read.
While I am opposed to the banning of books in any capacity, I would recommend that those looking to keep kids (and adults for that matter) away from certain publications you just make sure not to do it in an “official way”.
Hundreds of books have been removed from curriculum along with required or suggested reading lists for students for a number of years now–it just wasn’t done through a resolution passed by a school board. Teachers and librarians have been told by those within academics not to provide such books to kids as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, the Little House on the Prairie series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Heart of Darkness is now blacklisted because it depicts 19th century Africans as “savages” and glorifies colonialism. Gone With the Wind is out due to it’s ante-bellum portrayal of slavery. Little House is now “problematic” because of its caricature of Native Americans and their displacement by white settlers like the Ingalls. Jane Eyre promotes subjugation of women–while Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Mockingbird all include racial language and terms common to people in the times they were written. The main difference between their removal from classrooms and that of Maus is that it is the teachers and school administrators making the decision–and not elected parents and taxpayers in the district.
Another approach that is catching on fast to get books banned is “author shaming”. Nearly all Dr Seuss books were destined for the recycling bin until the trust that oversees publication of his works agreed to stop publishing five books including: To Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo. Zoo had to go because it depicted people–including some of different races–being held in cages. Mulberry was out because of illustrations of Chinese men dating back to colonial days. Ironically, that one was never banned in in China itself–however, Ebay will not let people resell copies, deeming it “offensive material”. National Read Across America Day–which is on March 2nd, Theodor Geisel’s birthday–has distanced itself from Dr Seuss, and The Cat in the Hat is no longer the preferred book for politicians posing for videos while reading to the kids gathered at their feet.
Meanwhile, the jury is still out as to whether the Harry Potter books will no longer be recommended for young readers. Author J.K. Rowling is now labeled a “TERF–or Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist” for opposing the idea that people who experienced male puberty should be competing against cis-gendered females in things like organized sports. Her public statements have already led to re-published reviews of her works in venues like Rolling Stone and Vox–where the authors “look at the books through a new lens” and find plenty of “problematic” elements. There have also been organized efforts to downgrade the ratings of Rowling’s books on sites like Amazon and Apple Books. Despite those efforts, Rowling is sticking by her guns.
So if you want to keep literary works away from “impressionable minds” don’t run for your local school board. Get that teaching certification or become a big donor to the local library and do your dirty work out of the public’s view.
