If Maus was ‘banned,’ then so was To Kill a Mockingbird.
If Maus was ‘banned,’ then so was To Kill a Mockingbird.
W hen the Right takes a book off a school reading list, it’s a “ban” and cause for despair, calumny, and outrage. When the Left does so, it’s merely a removal and passes by with hardly any mention in the media. We saw both sides of this rule at play in the last two weeks. What a wonderful natural experiment it was.
The media almost unanimously used the word “ban” to describe a Tennessee school board’s decision to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus from a middle-school curriculum on the grounds that its adult content about the Holocaust is inappropriate for eighth graders. I’d argue that it’s inappropriate for eighth graders because it’s a picture book. I’m not sure at what age children should complete the transition to mastering text without pictures, but I would hope it happens before puberty arrives.
Among the outlets that reported in the last week of January that the McMinn County school board in Athens, Tenn., had “banned” Maus on January 10 were the New York Times, the Washington Post (which also reported that the book was “censored”), CNN, the Jerusalem Post, CNBC, the New York Post, Slate, and many others.
All of these outlets reported something that simply did not happen. The book was not banned. It was removed from a curriculum. The board said that it seeks “to find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion.” Students in McMinn Country are free to buy and read the book. It remains available in local public libraries. A bookseller in California offered to send up to 100 free copies to families in McMinn County, and no government body is interfering with these shipments. Maus hit No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list, it was still in the top 30 as of Monday morning, and it is reaping its biggest publicity windfall since its publication in 1991. If not being on a curriculum means it is “banned,” then so is every other book not on any school’s curriculum.
Meanwhile, on January 24 a school board in Washington State removed To Kill a Mockingbird from its required curriculum for the ninth grade. The response to this move was about as loud as the sound a sparrow feather makes when it crashes into a pillow. With the exception of one 54-second report on King 5, a local news station, the nation barely even noticed. (Though I credit Jake Tapper of CNN for drawing my attention to the matter in a tweet; as far as I can tell he was the only major non-right-wing figure who took any interest in the decision at first.)
The war on To Kill a Mockingbird is, of course, a left-wing impulse; in generations to come, the book is likely to be seen as increasingly embarrassing by the gentry liberals who have always been its champions. The local news report on King 5 described the withdrawal as driven by left-wing concerns about the book’s use of the N-word and its being “written by a white author who lacks the cultural lens to accurately present the lived experience of racism by the marginalized.” I suppose that rules Harper Lee out of writing a book about herself and her dad.
When Whoopi Goldberg opposed the parallel school-board decisions on The View on January 31, her point was drowned out by the ruckus over her claim in the same segment that the Holocaust was not about race but “man’s inhumanity to man.”
To the extent progressives took any interest in the To Kill a Mockingbird withdrawal, it was solely because they assumed that right-wingers had demanded it. USA Today columnist Michael J. Stern, referring to the exchange on The View, said it was proof that “Republicans are banning everything that teaches children about the imperfect realities of life. This is Trumpism – if we don’t like it, we lie about it and deny its existence.”
Needless to say, almost nobody — not CNN, not the Washington Post, not the New York Times — reported the Washington school board’s actions as a “ban.” The Times didn’t even mention the Washington school-board action until nearly a week later, and then gave it only a cursory mention, without using the word “ban,” in the 21st paragraph of a piece that mostly denounced right-wing book “bans.” The CNN site’s only mention was this one, days later, in a (highly typical) Brian Stelter column: “Fox recently hyped a Washington state school district’s action against To Kill a Mockingbird.” Neither Stelter nor anyone else at the CNN site can be found explaining what that action was, much less explaining why it is less notable than the Tennessee school board’s move against Maus, which has inspired at least five major stories on CNN.com and has been mentioned prominently in several others.
In the Washington Post, apart from referring to the Washington school board move in the ninth paragraph of a story about Goldberg’s suspension from The View, in which it claimed the Tennessee decision was “to ban” but the Washington decision was “to remove,” the paper’s only mention of the To Kill a Mockingbird decision was a passing reference in the tenth paragraph of a Dana Milbank column that lambasted right-wingers for being “snowflakes” for “banning” Maus. (To Kill a Mockingbird, according to Milbank, had merely been “removed.”)
Times and tastes do change, and the books that seem like the best choices to approach historical and social concepts can change also. Maybe To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t such a great tool to teach racial tolerance. Maybe Elie Wiesel’s Night is superior to Maus for teaching the Holocaust. Schools are entitled to tinker with the way they teach things. The rest of us don’t need to get hysterical about such decisions. And we certainly don’t need to confuse them with censorship.