Of Maus and Mockingbirds

Deshelving is having a moment.

Over the last week we’ve seen two powerful and controversial books go on the chopping block. In Mukilteo, Washington, To Kill a Mockingbird was removed from a required reading list, and in McMinn County, Tennessee, Maus was removed from the eighth grade reading list.

The reasons for both are shocking. The Mukilteo school board voted unanimously to make To Kill a Mockingbird optional reading because of concerns about racism. In other words, a book about racism is being removed from reading lists because of concerns about racism. The American Library Association, in its list of most challenged books by year, explains that the 1960 Harper Lee classic about a white Southern lawyer who represents a black defendant against a race-charged accusation of rape has been “banned and challenged for racial slurs and their negative effect on students, featuring a ‘white savior’ character, and its perception of the Black experience.”

Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel based on his father’s experience in the Holocaust, in which Jews are depicted as mice and Germans as cats, was pulled from the curriculum due to eight curse words, nudity, and depictions of suicide. In other words, we should teach about genocide as long as it’s appropriate.

Book bans have become a popular topic lately, with right and left accusing one another of inhibiting education. The truth is, both right and left are messing with education, and we need to call them both out.

On the right, legislators are calling for curbing progressive books that deal with race and gender. The left loves to use this illiberalism to win arguments around free speech and critical race theory, which they think is a mythical ideology that exists only as a boogeyman in the conspiracy-rotted minds of racist Republicans. On the left, though, there is a sort of verbal gerrymandering going on, a postmodern attempt to dismantle and rebuild language and reality, notably around race and gender that’s well documented in schools across the country. The right sees this as an Orwellian assault on family values, freedom, and the promise of America.

Never the twain shall meet? No, they meet right here. They meet in what we call safetyism, in the fear among adults that The Children will be harmed by ideas. That black students will be injured reading about Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson, that seeing the n-word in print might cause harm, that a naked mouse in a graphic novel about a genocide might…do what exactly?

The Maus ban is getting a lot of attention. However, I suspect that the outrage over Maus is more about the conservative district of Tennessee than it is about the merits of the novel. Look at those Republicans, banning books again! Yet demoting To Kill a Mockingbird is just as troubling. We are supposed to be reckoning with racism. This decision undermines that. It, shall we say, whitewashes it.

When I was in middle school, I read voraciously. And every book I read was categorically awful. I read RL Stine, Christopher Pike, and lots of books about young women getting cancer and AIDS and committing suicide. (Too Young to Die? Yes, please!) After 15 years of therapy, I turned out fine. (Kidding!) These terrible stories gripped me, but they never left me fetishizing illness or wishing I was being chased by an axe murderer or killing myself. They didn’t leave me “traumatized.” They left me wanting more books. It should be that much more true for the best stories.

But the kids, you know, they might be traumatized. I highly recommend this conversation on Bari Weiss’s podcast, as she also noticed this uptick in “trauma” and sought to get to the bottom of it. Her guest, clinical psychologist George Bonanno, explains that life-threatening events are not guaranteed traumas, but rather potential traumatic experiences, and that the trauma diagnosis is overplayed.

What’s also troubling to me is the apparent inverse relationship of kids getting more depressed, anxious, and suicidal while their adults protect them more and more. Maybe, grownups, we are focused on the wrong thing? Sure, give your kid unfettered access to the internet (yes, he has found the porn, don’t talk to me about your parental controls) but cull the established canon of literature lest it cause him to slip into moral degeneracy or simply feel “unsafe.”

This was the topic taken up by The View earlier this week, with the gaggle of hosts starting out an interesting discussion about the censorship surge. Unfortunately, the conversation got derailed by Whoopi Goldberg, who inadvertently stepped right into a steaming pile. Goldberg, who has claimed Jewish ancestry but has none, got into hot water for arguing that the Holocaust was not about racism but rather “man’s inhumanity to man” and white-against-white violence.

She illustrates a problem we’ve seen a lot lately: Jews becoming separated from their own histories and squished into modern narratives about race that are divorced from reality and exclusive to American thinking. This feeds the idea that there’s nothing unique about anti-Semitism, as if hate crimes against Jews randomly happen, like we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time over and over again. As Goldberg puts it, white people can just go fight amongst themselves.

This stems not from discrimination or hate, but from ignorance, and as I’ve pointed out before, the flattening of the Jewish experience into black-and-white categories. It also stems from the universalization of the Holocaust—we don’t take school groups to Holocaust museums just to learn about anti-Semitism and Jewish history. We hope that they will come away with a broader commitment to social justice and shared humanity.

So is it a surprise, given these two trends, that Goldberg would say that the Holocaust is anything other than man’s inhumanity to man?

As former View producer Daniella Greenbaum poignantly shared in a Washington Post op-ed:

Antisemitism is older, and different — and in some ways, more deeply embedded — than the forms of racism Americans are used to recognizing. Goldberg’s error on the show is an opportunity: “The View” and the broader media can treat it as a gaffe, a misstatement, an unfortunate turn of phrase to be apologized for and quickly forgotten. Or they can interrogate what it means that she thought — and said — what she did. On Tuesday morning on “The View,” while again apologizing, Goldberg started out by saying, “Yesterday, I misspoke.” She didn’t misspeak, though. She shared a viewpoint that was misguided and ignorant — but it was the viewpoint she genuinely meant to share.

So what now? Pack up Goldberg in a box with our copies of Maus and To Kill a Mockingbird and put them up in the attic?

Greenbaum has a point: that this is an opportunity for us to break out of the definitions other people create for us and expect us to uphold. While we are no more monolithic than the black community or any other American minority, we could seize the moment to look at our struggles as shared, not competing, and to find the courage to come forward and clarify who we are. It could be a chance for us to embrace compassion, not cancellation.

It’s not justice to punish Goldberg; it’s not justice to deshelve classic books because they are hard to read. Neither To Kill a Mockingbird nor Maus ends with real justice. Maybe the long arc of history doesn’t, in fact, bend toward justice. Maybe it just zigzags until the sun blows up, I don’t know.

But history and literature and people are messy and complicated, and that’s why we should look them in the eye. That’s exactly why we should be reading difficult books, and encouraging our kids to be challenged, and when they are uncomfortable, we step up to be the parents and teachers and adults we are supposed to be. That’s where the conversation starts.

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This week last year

Hitler's Worst Nightmare

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