Book Censorship Isn't What It Used To Be
A school board banning Maus isn't the slide into Stalinism that panicking writers want it to be
Last month, a school board in southeastern Tennessee apparently threatened freedom of the press and intellectual freedom as we know it. The Guardian speaks of “censorship campaigns” sweeping across the United States, Representative Steve Cohen called it a case of “censoring books about the Holocaust,” and Marilisa Jiménez Garcia at The Atlantic says that it’s not just intellectual freedom, but the “possibility of a more just future” itself at stake when we take away certain assigned readings from students. It sounds serious.
I have my doubts.
Here are the facts of the case: early this year, Tennessee’s McMinn County Board of Education met to discuss complaints about Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which an 8th grade teacher planned to use as the anchor text for a Holocaust unit. School board members expressed concern over the graphic content of the book, including repeated depictions of corpses and slaughter. They were especially perturbed by “cuss words” (their term) like “god damn” and “bitch,” and a single panel depicting an anthropomorphic mouse woman’s naked corpse. Their reasoning, I suppose, was while reading an account of the German state systematically murdering six million Jews with gas, fire, bullets, and bayonets, students might be disturbed by some foul language and light nudity. Teenagers hate that stuff, you know. The measure to ban passed unanimously.
The school board’s actions are, to be clear, offensive to our traditions of free expression and insulting to the many millions of Holocaust survivors and their living descendants. To put it in terms that might catch the school board’s attention, they showed their asses by voting like a bunch of god-damned bitches, and any right-thinking taxpayer in McMinn County should be watching their school board’s next move very closely.
But if we really care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship and speaking truth to power and all that, we need to be deliberate and precise in what we say. What the McMinn County school board has done, and what other school boards and statehouses are attempting isn’t worth worrying about.
The Turkish government murdering Hrant Dink for “insulting Turkishness” by discussing Turkey’s role in the Armenian Genocide is censorship. The Iranian government intervening to stop productions of Shakespeare is censorship. The Chinese Communist Party training artificial intelligence programs to scan and scrub all anti-Communist words and images from the Chinese internet is censorship. Germany’s criminalization of Holocaust denial is censorship, though inarguably good censorship done with good intentions for a good cause. One school board in Tennessee banning one book, or the State of Texas arbitrarily demanding the surrender of a few hundred books chosen at random and without any real possibility of prosecution or punishment may be many things, but it’s not exactly the end of the First Amendment as we know it.
For one thing, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the free speech of students for decades. From Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) to Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021), the Court has been clear: except in niche cases of obscenity and safety, students enjoy full First Amendment rights at school, and can’t be censored for any political views expressed in a non-disruptive, non-threatening way. No matter how much Republicans try to clear that post with nebulous language about white students experiencing “racial discomfort” when they read critical race theory, there will always be a way for students and teachers to calmly, respectfully, and Constitutionally discuss the Holocaust or read Frederick Douglass. The McMinn County school board probably has the right to ban Maus on obscenity grounds, but not discussion of history and politics they don’t happen to like.
But legality aside, it’s also just very hard to censor anything or anyone these days. To completely disappear books and ideas, you either need an overwhelming consensus (as in Germany’s democratically-supported suppression of Holocaust denial) or a repressive authoritarian regime willing to maim, imprison, and murder over books it doesn’t like. In the United States, we have neither. In fact, we have a pretty robust, non-partisan resentment towards any censorship, real or perceived. When conservatives got it into their head that Dr. Seuss Enterprises was “cancelling” six of the old master’s books for their offensive images, they suddenly became cultural touchstones for millions of angry Fox News viewers, scooping up cheap copies and circulating PDFs online in an attempt to own the libs.
It’s not much different on the left. As of this writing, two of the three most popular graphic novels on Amazon are editions of Maus. Tennessee’s Nirvana Comics has raised $80,000 to buy copies of Maus for the children of McMinn County. The county’s public library has had to beg strangers from all over the country to please, for the love of God, stop donating copies of Maus as an act of symbolic protest and start donating money to support the library’s many other vital public services if you really want to stick it to the conservatives.
And that gives away the whole game: Maus isn’t being censored in any meaningful way, but a school board exercising its legal right to ban a book from a classroom on grounds of obscenity just doesn’t keep up the churn of culture war or spin the gears of the internet hate machine like cries of censorship!!!! do. There are certain vocal conservatives and leftists of various stripes with a desperate, aching need for each other, and who relish the idea that enemies are afoot and the fate of American education rests on their keyboards.
The truth, of course, that a few districts banning a few books only makes those works more popular, more accessible, and more lucrative. If I had a book to promote, I’d be angling to get my books banned as widely as possible. This is not the same thing as having it be read and adored, touching the hearts and minds of pupils everywhere. After all, the most important fact about banning books in America is the one authors and journalists want to discuss the least: students never do their assigned reading, anyway.