MEMPHIS, Tenn. — We have witnessed plenty of backwards thinking behavior at school board meetings across Tennessee during the past year. There was the totally misplaced effort to ban teaching critical race theory – something what isn’t even happening public schools. And how about the fights – some of them literally – over students being forced to wear masks in the classroom to help slow the spread of COVID-19.
Now comes word of another ridiculous decision from McMinn County in East Tennessee. The school board there earlier this month voted unanimously to remove the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning book ‘Maus’ from the district’s eighth grade curriculum. The book is a graphic novel that tells the story of the author’s Jewish parents living in Poland in the 1940s during the Holocaust. The story traces their ordeal in an internment camp at Auschwitz, and the book depicts Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.
But the McMinn County school board members convinced themselves that the story is offensive and too much for eighth graders. Well, I say this decision is too much.
I have simply had it with self-righteous politicians and school leaders who want to shield grade school students from the truth about racism and white supremacy. These are some of the same people who screamed bloody murder when Confederate monuments were removed for public spaces – claiming it was getting rid of history. The hypocrisy is stunning, but not surprising.