Banned. Deleted. Rendered nonexistent. Removed for consumption, barred from access. That’s what comes to mind when I hear a book is banned. I see roaring fires and angry mobs rising up to consume and destroy. That’s why one of the reasons two news stories, their headlines in particular, have stood out to me as dishonest and inflammatory1. The two stories both involve school districts making curricular decisions and feature the negative responses to the actions. The first story, Backlash after school banned ‘Jingle Bells’ over Christmas, comes from the New York Post, and is about the removal of the song Jingle Bells from Brighton’s Council Rock Primary School music curriculum. The second story, Holocaust novel ‘Maus’ banned in Tennessee school district from the Associated Press, is about the removal of the holocaust novel Maus from the eighth-grade English curriculum by the McMinn County School Board.
The actual stories are more nuanced than bannings. Jingle Bells was removed from the Council Rock Primary School curriculum because the administration found an article suggesting that its first performance may have been at a minstrel show2. In my view, the choice was foolish and unreasonable. The song has no apparent connotations with slavery or oppression and even the author of the article that sparked the removal was shocked by the choice. The excising of the song, while foolish, was not a banning. At worst, it was a poorly founded but relatively harmless curricular change, at best, it made a slim margin of people feel more comfortable about the school curriculum. Would I have made the change? No,3 but that doesn’t mean that the administration of Council Rock Primary acted maliciously, only that I feel that they made a poor choice.
The removal of Maus has a similar story. McMinn County School Board members voted unanimously to remove the book from the eighth-grade curriculum for its inclusion of profanity and nudity. The decision faced significant pushback and became a global news story4, though, in later meetings, the board maintained their original decision. The board members chose to find a new, age appropriate, book about the holocaust to use in the curriculum, rather than to continue to use Maus. Now, as a former middle school student, I’m fairly certain that removing a book for profanity is a particularly productive or meaningful choice. Perhaps, in McMinn County, the student code of conduct is stricter, or perhaps the school board is naive. Either way, nothing I’ve seen has suggested that the school board members acted out of malice, or in an attempt to prevent the teaching of the holocaust. I think that the reasoning used to remove the book was weak but framing the curricular change as a ban of the book is wrong5.
So why do both articles frame the curricular changes as bannings? Put simply, the word “ban” and its associated negative connotation drives outrage and clicks. Many news organizations use sensational headlines to increase engagement and, as a result, ad revenue. The inflammatory rhetoric, while great for engagement, is damaging to the public discourse and increases division. When reporting around a current event is steeped in negative connotations and dishonesty, it’s hard to form an informed opinion, and even harder to have a discussion with someone who disagrees with you.
As a result of these articles and others like them, I have a suggestion: When you read a news article about a banning, give those involved the benefit of the doubt, actually determine the real facts of the case, and assume good intentions unless given a good reason to do otherwise. When you see a headline saying a book or song has been banned, read the article and make sure that’s an honest assessment of the action. Articles and headlines like these are damaging and unhelpful, but often it’s possible to form an informed opinion if you read past the deceptive language and get to the truth.
The original version of this piece was published in the Spring 2022 edition of Valor Dictus and is being posted here because I couldn’t find an image to include for the web edition while I was on staff.
Footnotes
-
Given the extreme delay in publishing this, these headlines are relatively old ↩
-
a form of entertainment prevalent in the 1800s in which white actors performed in blackface (this was originally parenthetical and probably always unecessary). ↩
-
and I mean this emphatically ↩
-
If I recall correctly, it got coverage across the US and internationally in the Jerusalem post (though I don’t entirely remember) ↩
-
Another problem with the article cited in particular is the way that the AP tries to tie the change directly into the CRT argument when it doesn’t appear to be related. ↩