A Liberal
Dose
February
10, 2022
Troy D.
Smith
“Why Taking
Maus Out of Middle School Matters”
Last week I talked about the controversial removal of Maus from the middle school curriculum in McMinn County, a decision made by
the school board and not by the teachers (the book is approved for 8th
grade by the state of Tennessee, by the way). Ostensibly, the board’s concern
was a handful of swear words (despite it being brought to their attention that
some other books they teach, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, have far more)
and a picture of a naked female mouse. I looked through my copy of the graphic
novel twice and couldn’t find this image; I learned that it was actually a tiny
image in the background of a panel portraying Jews being herded into the showers
to be gassed. Several board members also complained that the story was too
disturbing for 13-year-olds.
My uncle (by marriage), Edgar Lebenhart, was a Jewish
Czech immigrant and a Holocaust refugee. He and two of his brothers escaped
their homeland when the Nazis took over, and virtually the entirety of their
immediate and extended family died in concentration camps. Although he died back
in 1978, some of you may remember him -he owned the shirt factories Path and EL
Apparel. As a child I met both his brothers and their wives, one of whom was an
Auschwitz survivor. I was curious about the number tattooed on her wrist, and
my uncle explained the Holocaust to me -I was 8 -and I sought out books to
learn more about it. I remember, at age 11, reading a Captain America comic
book about an elderly woman who was an Auschwitz survivor, and thinking how
much she looked like the woman I had met. My point is, I was certainly able to
handle this kind of information by the time I was 13. Where language is
concerned, there is nothing in Maus that I did not hear every day within five
minutes of getting on the school bus. It is imperative that kids learn about
this stuff -and 13 is not too young -and in the context of just how terrible it
really was, or else it will be forgotten (as it already is by many young
people, as I pointed out last time).
But there’s more going on than that. Word of the Maus banning came scarcely more then a week after news that a state-sponsored
Tennessee adoption agency, under Governor Lee’s “religious freedom” law, had
denied a family a child because they were Jewish. It came at the same time as
news of hostages being taken in a synagogue in Texas… just three years after
the horrible synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh… which was only one year after
white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia (where they killed
one counter-protester), chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us” and “Blood and
Soil” (which was a Nazi catchphrase.) In-between there have been countless
incidents of synagogue vandalism and assaults on Jewish people. Heck, just the
other day a dozen protesting Nazis in Florida beat up a Jewish bystander whose
grandfather had survived the Holocaust. After decades of being done mostly in
subtle ways, suddenly anti-Semitic prejudice is becoming open and violent.
Similarly, violence or antagonism toward other minorities have increased
dramatically.
All this would seem to indicate that education about
the Holocaust, slavery, Jim Crow, and other such topics is becoming more vital
than ever for young people. Yet, at the same time, more and more conservative
politicians -egged on by their base, who in turn are egged on by reactionaries
in the conservative media -are passing laws making it harder to teach such
topics because it might make white people feel uncomfortable or guilty. It
doesn’t take a genius to see the potential results. Maybe that McMinn board was
influenced by such thinking and maybe it wasn’t, but considering all the books
they didn’t ban it certainly doesn’t
make them -or Tennessee -look good.
--Troy D. Smith,
a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech.
His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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