Banning Maus in Tennessee: Another Salvo in the Culture War, Another Step Toward Fascism
Language Was the Excuse, But the Assault is About Far More That
A school board in Tennessee has removed Maus, a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust, from its curriculum. The reason? Language, brutality, nudity, a disrespect for parents, suicide — all of the things that are tied to the experience many had of the Holocaust and continue to have.
Here is an excerpt of the debate — taken from the board’s minutes. Tony Allman is a school board member, Julie Goodin and Melasawn Knight are educators.
Allman: (Maus) shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy.
Goodin: I can talk of the history, I was a history teacher and there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history. Mr. Spiegelman did his very best to depict his mother passing away and we are almost 80 years away. It’s hard for this generation, these kids don’t even know 9/11, they were not even born. For me this was his way to convey the message. Are the words objectionable? Yes, there is no one that thinks they aren’t but by taking away the first part, it’s not changing the meaning of what he is trying to portray and copyright.
Allman: I understand that on tv and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?
Knight: I think any time you are teaching something from history, people did hang from trees, people did commit suicide and people were killed, over six million were murdered. I think the author is portraying that because it is a true story about his father that lived through that. He is trying to portray that the best he can with the language that he chooses that would relate to that time, maybe to help people who haven’t been in that aspect in time to actually relate to the horrors of it. Is the language objectionable? Sure. I think that is how he uses that language to portray that.
Allman: I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel. It’s like when you’re watching tv and a cuss word or nude scene comes on it would be the same movie without it. Well, this would be the same book without it. I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy. You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.
Note the way Allman’s argument moves from the brutality, which he initially says is inappropriate, to complaints about the language and then to complaints about Spiegelman’s work for other entities. And he claims, speciously, that by assigning Maus, the district is endorsing the horrors that Spiegelman presents, horrors that are part of the history and that the book presents not to titillate but as evidence of the depravity of the Nazi regime.
There is a kitchen-sink quality to this approach, as though he is tossing whatever he can against the wall and hoping some complaint sticks, that some complaint resonates with his audience. It is a tactic we are seeing across the country, as conservatives at the grassroots level attempt to turn the teaching of history and literature into patriotic exercises or endorsements of traditional mores. (There have been efforts coming from the left to pull books, also for specious reasons, but that’s not my focus here.)
Books about gays and lesbians have long been in the rightwing crosshairs, sexuality and fear of difference being a central concern of right for decades, and the American Library Associations’ annual list of banned books regularly features a large number of books with gay or trans characters or themes.
Also on the list are books deemed “anti-police,” or that teach about slavery and the Jim Crow era, or that attempt to explain the historical impact of racism, or question aspects of American hegemony.
It would be easy to dismiss these efforts as isolated, or to view them as bubbling up from the grassroots — just a bunch of parents concerned for their kids — but they are neither isolated nor locally driven. Many of the books are on lists circulating nationally, with funding from major conservative groups. As The Guardian reported this week, “most incidents” share “a common format.” Many are linked to groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, which in turn have links to powerful conservative groups like he Independent Women’s Forum, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and others. So, while Mom’s for Liberty “might suggest a homely, kitchen-table effort, it is actually part of a larger network of “other supposed grassroots groups backed by conservative donors.”
The ALA told Publisher’s Weekly in November that it had “seen a 60% increase in challenges to books received in the month of September compared to last year.”
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the ALA’s director of the Office for Information Freedom, said that “the volume of challenges” is new and that it “appears to be the result of an organized movement by certain groups to impose their political views and make them the norm for education and for our society as a whole.”
She pointed to a list that had been circulated in Texas by a state lawmaker of 850 books that covered topics ranging from sexuality and gender, to race and immigration, and includes critically acclaimed scholarly works of history and personal narratives about the Holocaust. Maus is not on the list, but the banning of the book in Tennessee is not the first time it has been removed from libraries or bookstores, as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund points out.
Spiegelman told CNN (via Rolling Stone) he has “moved past total bafflement.” He was shocked that his book was targeted based on language, though “that’s really where the genuine focus seemed to be.”
He added a caveat: “I think they’re so myopic in their focus and they’re so afraid of what’s implied and having to defend the decision to teach Maus as part of the curriculum that it led to this daffily myopic response.” Translation: The focus on language may have been less about the words than about not wanting to defending removing a book about the Holocaust and the rise of fascism from the reading list.
“It has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it,” he said, adding ghat it could be “a harbinger of things to come.”
I don’t think this is hyperbole. Attacks on what the right is calling “critical race theory” — as opposed to actual Critical Race Theory, which is a graduate school level approach to racial history and its impact on our institutions — are being used to gin up anger. So is the attempted marginalization of the 1619 Project, not just on the right but by a group of leading historians who apparently have a stake in defending status quo historical narrative. (There are flaws in the what was produced, but the larger project adds a lot to the discussion of race, capitalism, and how we view ourselves as Americans.)
The right’s response has been far more aggressive than the kind of cancelation the left is accused of engaging in. It has marshaled state and federal resources (Trump’s 1776 Commission) to shut down these kinds of debates. The use of the state — or corporate America (See my pieces on Twitter’s banning of Trump here:
and here
— to shut down debate and to impose patriotism and patriotic mythology in place of rigorous historical research and education is one of the pillars of fascism, and it has to be viewed alongside the efforts by people like Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to normalize cruelty, to push the “big lie” and delegitimize the election process.
It's just all so disingenuous. These are the same people who would cry that you can't take down monuments depicting actual people who committed atrocities because it would erase history. I'm so tired of these people having platforms, power, and being taken seriously.