The Books That Don't Count
With the banning of Maus and other books, leaders of modern moral panics take their place in a legacy of gatekeeping.
One of my most vivid childhood memories comes from the third grade. We were walked down single file to the Holy Redeemer Catholic School library and given the simplest of instructions: find any book you want to read and write a report on.
I suppose everyone who becomes a writer can recall the details of the libraries of their youth. Ours was a small, dark-paneled room whose high shelves were still mostly stocked with books published 30 years before. This was a Catholic school in Flint, Michigan in the '80s, after all. There wasn't much budget or appetite to stock the shelves with the plucky adventures of The Babysitters Club or the fever dream-inspired imagery of the Choose Your Own Adventure titles. But I loved old books even then, so I trucked the rickety metal stool to the corner where the classic adventure titles were shelved and reached up for one I knew only by reputation: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
Sliding the battered brown cover of Jules Verne's novel across the big round table at the center of the room, I fully expected my teacher to praise me for picking up such advanced material. But instead, she didn't even look up from the legal pad she was tracking our picks on when she said, "Take it back and find something else." Shocked, I was barely able to stammer out a protest of "But...why?"
"It's science fiction, Kiel," she said, finally leveling an over-the-glasses stare at me. "Science fiction doesn't count."
I tried my best to mount a defense of the book ("HOW can this be science fiction when submarines are REAL???"), but ultimately I was defeated. I went back and pulled a copy of Where The Red Fern Grows or The Yearling or some other "proper" book where an animal died in the third act. But I didn't leave the library without also checking out 20,000 Leagues. That year, I read page after page of Verne's endless descriptions of fictional varieties of seaweed purely out of spite – a pattern of reading that would continue on through my undergrad years.
I frequently tell this story to the university students I teach today (most of them future teachers themselves), and they tend to react more with confusion than horror. "Why wouldn't sci-fi count?" they ask. "What's wrong with that?" Growing up in a post-Harry Potter age where the goal of educators and librarians is "Get the kids to read ANYTHING," the majority of suburban, middle class young adults can't conceive of a ruthlessly enforced hierarchy between "high culture" and "low culture." I get similar reactions when I explain Banned Books Week to them and point out how Captain Underpants is one of the most frequently challenged series in America.
Whatever our experience as young people, it's my strong inclination that most literate adults think that this kind of gatekeeping is not a real problem today. At the very least, it's not their problem.
But (and I suspect a lot of you were waiting for this "but" to arrive) the past few months of the Covid-caused, school-interruption madness that is gripping suburban America has resulted in widespread reports of book removals in schools and school libraries both at the local and state level. Just a cursory glance at social media over the past two weeks has brought in reports of book bannings and attempted bannings in Florida, Texas, Washington State, Missouri, Wyoming and Pennsylvania, where news of students banding together to read what unhinged adults are trying to hide from them is only a slight balm.
Of course, my childhood experience with individualized gatekeeping and these incidents aren't comparable on the face. In fact, things are much, much worse today – in large part because the current spate of challenges are hyper-targeted on books featuring or written by people of color or LGBTQ individuals. I don't have the space here to unpack the absurd outrage over so-called "Critical Race Theory" backlash, but if you've heard about it in the news (or saw it on a particularly cringey installment of the Dr. Phil program), you'll know that the moral panic being stoked over these things has very little basis in the reality of how students experience or are gratified by reading books both within and outside their own immediate experience.
So yes, my teacher admonishing me for my early nerdy proclivities isn't the same thing as the coordinated arms of the state denying minorities (and other kids!) access to literature that directly depicts and validates their lived experience.
However, just this week, news of what is for me the most dispiriting singular case of book removal to hit in this wave. To catch you up, Tennessee's McMinn County Board of Education voted unanimously to seek an alternate text about the Holocaust to replace Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus as a text in middle school classrooms. You can read the full transcript of the board’s deliberation on the matter here, but their reasoning for removal including the farcical claims that the book contains graphic nudity (their language to describe extremely simplified panels depicting cartoon mice being marched into the gas chambers), swear words (the occasional use of "Goddammit"), the fact that the author once worked for Playboy magazine (creating non-sexual gag cartoons that are not at all referenced or reprinted in the book) and perhaps most bafflingly that the book "shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids" (yes, that did in fact happen in the Holocaust).
This is particularly galling to me since I first read Maus as an 8th grader after finding a copy at a Waldenbooks going out of business sale (I'd known its reputation for a few years thanks to comic book magazines). I found (both then and today) that Spiegelman's work was a more direct, emotional and thorough examination of what the Holocaust was and what it means than other texts I read in school at the time (including The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night, strong as they may be). And throughout my early career as a journalist, I had occasion to converse and interview Spiegelman many times – experiences that deepened both my understanding of that horrific chapter in human history and the potential of comics as a medium in innumerable ways.
But to the larger issues at play, the attempt to remove Maus fits neatly in trend lines that connect my experience with educational resistance to so-called "low culture" and today's kids facing down the marching orders of thinly-veiled bigots. As a matter of fact, comics and graphic novels remain one of the most challenged categories of books nationwide. In this recent wave of "anti-CRT" panic, one of the most frequently challenged books has been Jerry Craft's wonderful New Kid, which I'm betting will go down in history not only as the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal but also as the first Newbery Medal winner to be so swiftly removed from the hands of kids who will love it.
Censors target graphic novels because they are easy pickings. It's so much more visceral to be able to point to an image without any context at all and scream at a parent "This is inappropriate!" than it is to make a nuanced analysis of a text on its individual merits. And despite the fact that expert after expert in the fields of education and reading have spent the past two decades singing the praises of graphic novels as books uniquely suited to pull in young readers who otherwise would spend all their days tapping ipad screens, the stink of "unrespectability" still hangs over the medium reaching back to the moral panics of the last century.
Because the bottom line is that the forces trying to remove these books from libraries has nothing to do with protecting children. It has everything to do with protecting orthodoxy. It's pure status quo enforcement. They don't want even a hint that a book might challenge a community's devotion to "the way things have always been" – whether that challenge be about forms of reading, systems of power, the ugliness of history or the need to acknowledge our shared humanity.
In short, books that make kids think don't count. There is no category that is acceptable to these people except comfort. And unless thinking readers make more noise and take more action, the hyper-narrow orthodoxy of the book banners is going to be the only kind of literature that counts for anyone anywhere.