After a Tennessee school board banned a graphic novel about the Holocaust from local middle schools, comic book store owners from near and far pledged to send students the book for free.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” was banned on January 10 after a vote by the McMinn County Board of Education.
Written by Art Spiegelman, “Maus” tells the story of his parents in the 1940’s, following the Jewish family’s experience with rising anti-Semitism to their internment at the Auschwitz concentration camp. It depicts the Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats.
The novel was removed for “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide,” the education board said in a statement, adding the work “was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools.”
As my friend Dan Kennedy tweeted:
“Every kid throughout time has figured this out on their own, but: Read the books they fight to ban, listen to the music they want to destroy, and see the art they try to burn.”
Hell yeah.
And it’s true. Since banning the book, “Maus” shot up the bestseller list. Local bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon can’t keep it in stock. I placed my own order more than three weeks ago, and it just arrived last week.
As is often the case, banning a book only causes it to be more widely read.
Huzzah.
This is important to keep in mind because throughout the country, books are being banned from school libraries and removed from school curriculums at alarming rates for a variety of reasons, often related to race and sexuality.
It turns out that lots of fragile, white, conservative parents are afraid that their fragile, white children will crumble under the knowledge that LESS THAN TWO LIFETIMES AGO, black people in this country were owned like livestock. Raped, beaten, and murdered indiscriminately by their owners. Routinely separated from parents, spouses, and their own children FOREVER. Denied the freedoms afforded to us by the Constitution. Denied basic human rights.
But damn it, so says those same white, fragile parents, that was TWO WHOLE LIFETIMES ago. Plenty of time for those formerly enslaved people to have created institutional wealth and recovered fully from systemic and nationalized murder, rape, and abuse. Plenty of time to move past the post Civil War violence, lynchings, and legalized bigotry that dominated the Jim Crow south LESS THAN ONE LIFETIME AGO.
No need for our children to know what was happening in this country back then.
Hell, it was A WHOLE 100 HUNDRED YEARS AGO that the Mississippi state Senate voted to evict the state’s Black residents — the majority of its total population — not just out of Mississippi, but out of the country.
On February 20, 1922, the Mississippi Senate voted 25 to 9 to ask the federal government to trade some of the World War I debts owed by European countries for a piece of colonial Africa — any part would do — where the government would then ship Mississippi’s Black residents, creating “a final home for the American negro.”
Mississippi wanted to forcibly eject all Black people from their homes and export them off to a different continent. But damn it, that was a century ago. More than enough time for Black Americans to throw off the shackles of bigotry and make a life for themselves.
Why teach children any of these truths? Why expose them to this ugly part of American history? Why give them reason to look back on our country’s past in a not-so-pristine light?
It might be too much for them.
Of course, “Maus” doesn’t deal with racism in America. Instead, it deals with the Holocaust, which happened ONE LIFETIME AGO. It depicts the violent and horrific period in our world’s history when millions of human beings were systematically murdered based up their religious beliefs. Far too terrifying to be shown to middle schoolers, even if the characters are depicted in cartoon animal form.
Besides, the Holocaust is also a piece of history. A thing of the past. Why linger on such horrors? Right?
Yes, it’s true that the white supremacists in Charlottesville chanted “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” before killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring many more. But that was FIVE years ago.
And yes, Nazis openly demonstrated in Florida LAST WEEK, sparking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis refusal to condemn them, claiming that demands to do so was somehow an attempt to smear him and his party.
And yes, on Saturday, Republican members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar spoke at a white supremacist, anti-Semitic, pro-Putin event.
And yes, my Jewish daughter was recently told by someone that Hitler should’ve killed more Jews.
But why teach middle schoolers about antisemitism and bigotry? Why expose them to the horrors of the Holocaust in cartoon form?
That was something that happened long ago.
Happily, students are fighting back.
In York, Pennsylvania, attempts by an all-white school board to ban a list of educational resources that includes a children’s book about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography, Sesame Street’s town hall on racism, “A Boy Called Bat” about a third grader with autism, and “Cece Loves Science,” a book about a curious girl who loves experiments, were met with organized protests by students that ultimately overturned the ban.
It also resulted in a dramatic increase in sales of those books.
It’s bizarre and illogical for these authoritarian school boards and narrow minded parents to think that banning books would lead to some sort of protective bubble around their children. Particularly in today’s world, where parents are placing phones in the hands of their children at younger and younger ages, affording them unfettered access to the internet, the attempts at shielding children from the realities of bigotry and hate are ridiculous and impossible.
But damn, it sure is good for book sales.
If these adults were hoping to put more of these books into circulation, they have certainly accomplished their mission and continue to do so.
