Give Rural Whites a Break

The decision of the McMinn County school board in rural Tennessee to remove Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus from its Holocaust curriculum for middle school students has provided their cultural “betters” with an opportunity too good to pass up to express their contempt for the hicks.

Of particular merriment was the school board’s citation of “cuss words” — or more particularly, the “cuss words” directed by the young Spiegelman at his Holocaust survivor father; and “mouse nudity” — actually nudity of human figures with mouse heads, representing Jews.

In assessing the school board’s action, it is first important to understand what they did and didn’t do. They did not stop teaching about the Holocaust. Nor did they seek to ban Maus — something that would have been impossible in any event, given its easy accessibility.

The term “ban,” however, was inevitably used by critics of the board’s decision. Kyle Smith points out in the New York Post that news stories about school boards’ curricular changes for good, progressive reasons inevitably refer to a book’s “removal.” Stories about curricular changes made for non-progressive reasons, however, always refer to the books being “banned,” or to “censorship,” conjuring up Nazi book-burning.