Last evening on the FNC political chat show, The Five, the gang discussed education as an issue, and how it might affect the upcoming midterm elections. Jessica Tarlov, this week’s progressive panel member, indulged in the usual gaslighting: denials that any such thing as “critical race theory” is being taught in public schools. Now of course it is being taught in public schools, albeit under various cover names—as parents were displeased to discover during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telling those parents that it’s all a figment of their imaginations, planted there by MAGA semi-fascists, is pretty lame, even for a progressive Democrat.
Ms. Tarlov is no fool and realizes this. That’s why she quickly shifted her ground as the discussion proceeded, charging that said MAGA villains are engaged in “book banning.” Since it may be difficult to defend the literary merit of the highly sexualized gender ideology crappola that’s been slipped into public school curricula, she had a more reputable example to cite: the removal of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved from various public school reading lists. It can be taken for granted that her indignation has nothing to do with the literary merit of Beloved. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read it and perforce have no opinion about its literary quality.) As a novel about American slavery, written by a black woman, it is, ipso facto, above reproach in Woke progressive circles. To remove it from school reading lists—to ban it, as Ms. Tarlov charged—is, therefore held to be a vile act of racism.
I’ve got no patience with this charge.
The first thing to note is that Beloved has not been banned. Whatever our problems in America today, book banning is not among them. Parents who think their children need to read Toni Morrison’s novel remain perfectly free to obtain a copy and have them read it, and the same applies to any other books not included on a given school reading list.
A school reading list is of its nature exclusionary: The books listed stand in place of dozens of other books that were considered and rejected. So the question for Ms. Tarlov is this: If you wish to include Beloved on school reading lists that don’t include it, what book would you delete to make room for it? Its the old question of the tradeoff. And in this case we know what the answer is likely to be: some book by a white author, particularly a white male author.
As far as I know, Ms. Tarlov was not outraged when the Westport, Connecticut School District began to erase Shakespeare from its high school curriculum. He’s just one of those Dead White Guys, after all, so good riddance. Then there’s the case of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which has been removed from school reading lists all over the country on the specious grounds that it’s a racist tract. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has met a similar fate. What’s infuriating about these exclusions is that both novels are anti-slavery, anti-racist. What’s disgraceful about the exclusion of Huckleberry Finn is that it’s one of the great American novels. But it might “cause harm” to students of color, so out it goes.
Everybody understands the real reason for such exclusions, however: White people aren’t supposed to write about such things as slavery and racism. Only BIPOCs are qualified to do that.
Besides the hardy perennials, racism and white supremacy, various other excuses for these exclusions are given. In the case of Master Will, it’s argued that his plays, written in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century are too difficult for contemporary American students, and irrelevant besides. That strikes me as a poor justification for the intellectual impoverishment of young people. Personally, I would argue that Julius Caesar should be assigned in civics classes—if genuine civics is still taught, which I doubt—for the value of its profound meditation on the timeless themes of political hubris and political ambition. Indeed, my proposed high school reading list would put Ibram X. Kendi into cardiac arrest, so disdainful would it be of his “antiracism” claptrap.
Still, it must be conceded that progressive educators are no more banning Shakespeare, Twain, et al. than Ms. Tarolv’s mythical MAGA monsters are banning Beloved. As with Toni Morrison’s novel, parents who want their children to read Julius Caesar, Life on the Mississipppi or Animal Farm are free to do so. It may not be possible to get partisans on either side of this literary skirmish to stop blathering about bans, but it can at least be pointed out that to exclude books from school reading lists is not actually to ban them.
Alas, however, burgeoning illiberalism on both the Left and the Right has contributed toward the idea of making such bans respectable. And unless you’re willing to stand up against that spirit of intolerance, you’ve no business posing as a defender of “our democracy.”