Last month, the New York Times reported on the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board’s decision to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus from the eighth-grade curriculum. School board members cited nudity and profanity as justification for their decision. The ensuing controversy gave liberals fodder against the Right in the long-standing and increasingly prominent cultural debate around censorship and who is doing it. Incidents like this pop up periodically and read as procedurally as a Law & Order script. The plot always differs slightly (last season, it was Dr. Seuss), and the details might be more or less lurid. But it’s a show we’ve all seen often enough, never to be shocked by the ending. In this particular episode, the specter of antisemitism was invoked as the book in question, Maus, portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, fictionalizing the author’s parents’ experience in the Holocaust. Predictably, the New York Times “contextualized” the story by citing Anti-Defamation League statistics on antisemitic incidents and “a broader movement to ban books that address certain ideas about race, as well as those that address sex and LGBTQ issues,” clearly alluding to the critical race theory debate in education that has galvanized the Right in several states and local jurisdictions.
The article’s subject gave liberals a reason to reinvigorate a vintage culture war position that peaked in the ’80s in opposition to the Moral Majority and has not been relevant since Bush-era evangelical opposition to the Harry Potter series. And this battle has a comfortable setting, the small, conservative, footloose-quian Southern county that exists in the minds of New York Times readers as an archetypical and cartoonish heel, a backward place full of unthinking rednecks who are antagonistic to people like them, a sundown town for white women who use moleskin journals. In the past, this would have ended with Dana Carvey doing a Church Lady skit on SNL and a few snarky op-eds on Christian prudishness. Now, the dubious “context” provided by the New York Times allows its liberal readership to imagine their conservative cultural opponents as more Hitler than Falwell, as novelist Neil Gaiman suggested when he tweeted: “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”
MSNBC anchor Joy-Ann Reid produced a segment that recounted late 20th-century battles over the “banning” of books in public schools. She asked, “So hey, Republicans! Wokeness is communism, but book banning isn’t?” Of course, Maus was not banned by the McMinn County school district at all. It was merely removed from the curriculum. The majority of the segment focused on past censorship of another book, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. This was an interesting choice, since the people who consider Catcher in the Rye part of an imagined “canon of sad white men’s literature [that] reinforces the idea that male sexual deprivation is a public concern” (as an Electric Lit essay on “The Literary Roots of the Incel Movement” once did) almost certainly share Joy-Ann Reid’s politics more than any supposed “Republican book-banner” in east Tennessee.
Liberals, being rightly self-conscious about the conservative charge that they frequently engage in or advocate censorship in the realms of entertainment, academia, and social media, immediately pushed back on the notion that there is some equivalence between private and public censorship. Former Star Trek actor and Democratic Twitter darling George Takei posted that: “People who compare school book bans to the outcry over Joe Rogan’s misinformed podcast need a civics lesson. The 1st Amendment prohibits government censorship, which is why public school book bans are problematic. It does not reach private platforms such as Spotify.”
Such legalistic definitions of censorship are a distraction. In this case, McMinn County School Board members were well within their legal rights and mandate to determine the eighth-grade curriculum. The separation of private and public censorship is a useful one for liberals, as they dominate nearly every private institution capable of such censorship and almost none of the public ones outside of state universities and urban school districts. When conservatives complain about liberal censorship control in the media economy, they cite the newest areas of media, such as Twitter or YouTube, as examples, forgetting that liberals still control its oldest sector, book publishing.
Despite hypocrisy elsewhere, today, left-wing self-righteousness over book banning is safer than ever given the increasing unwillingness of liberals to write or publish anything interesting enough to get rid of. Terminating a book before it comes to term has become increasingly common in the publishing world. On his podcast Blocked and Reported, journalist Jesse Singal recently interviewed Alberto Gullaba Jr., a young writer who spent the last several years attempting to publish his debut novel University Thugs, which follows a group of primarily black college students at the University of Virginia and deals heavily with matters of class and de facto racial segregation on campus. After finishing the book based mainly on Gullaba’s own experiences at UVA, he quickly acquired a seasoned literary agent. The agent was enthusiastic about his work, as were several publishing houses, and at one point, a film studio. Publishers requested an author bio, and Gullaba wrote one. The agent sent it back, asking him to include more information on his background. Again, Gullaba did as requested, noting that he was born in Hawaii, where his father worked as a cane cutter at a sugar plantation, and that his family frequently moved after his father joined the military. This was not enough. The agent then requested a third bio, explicitly asking that Gullaba include his race. The third bio, which referred to his parents as Filipino immigrants, would derail his promising writing career. His agent called him immediately and said, “You’re not black? You’re Filipino? We’ve gotta get ahead of this. You’re gonna face a s*** storm.” What followed was a process Gullaba referred to as “racial compliance,” with his white agent telling him, “We need to swap some races around.” Specifically, one of the characters needed to be Filipino. Gullaba offered to rewrite a half-black, half-Korean character as half-Filipino instead.
“No,” the agent told him, “it has to be Filipino and it has to be full.” Publishers lost interest. At his agent’s request, Gullaba wrote a stand-in Filipino character. The agent then suggested that the entire book be rewritten from the Filipino character’s point of view and include scenes that feature heavy-handed racial discourse. However, the final straw was his agency hiring a black sensitivity reader. Gullaba was insulted by the idea that the new hire, a British woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, could relate to black men in Virginia any better than he could. He broke ties with the agent and self-published the book under the pseudonym Free Chef.
Gullaba’s experiences are not surprising given the hypersensitivity of liberal publishers toward the issue of race. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, over 1,300 publishing workers skipped work to protest, in their words, “the industry’s role in systemic racism through its failure to hire and retain a significant number of Black employees or publish a significant number of Black authors, and through its pursuit of profit through books that incite racism.” Despite the incendiary rhetoric, this “strike” was so profoundly empty and un-antagonistic that it attracted the endorsement and participation of management. After receiving backlash for letting Jeanine Cummins, a self-described white and Puerto Rican woman, publish a book about Mexican immigrants called American Dirt, management at Flatiron Books and its parent group Macmillan eagerly sat down to negotiate with #DignidadLiteraria, a “Latinx” group that was formed in opposition to American Dirt. The publisher readily committed to increasing its “Latinx” representation. While it’s true that minorities such as Hispanics are underrepresented in publishing, this supposed racial problem is really just a class one in disguise: An upper-middle-class white girl from Connecticut can afford to move to New York for an unpaid internship or entry-level job at a publishing house. This is something an equally talented young man from a working-class Hispanic family in Del Rio, Texas, could never do. Whatever sum of money and opportunity Macmillan coughs up to groups like #DignidadLiteraria will never fill the gulf between a Mexican boy from Del Rio who doesn’t call himself “Latinx” and the people who do. The latter like to scream on the former’s behalf, having lived lives comfortable enough to decide that ending an adjective with a vowel is exclusionary. And the rich white girl from Connecticut agrees.
But race isn’t the only issue subject to literary abortion. The liberal cause celebre changes with the Sweetgreen menu: always new, fresh, exciting, and delivered for a paltry tip, usually by some poor sap who can’t afford it himself. In the wake of the post-2021 “insurrection,” over 200 employees at Simon & Schuster signed an open letter asking management to end a seven-figure deal to publish former Vice President Mike Pence’s book as well as refrain from publishing future books by any member of the Trump administration. S&S refused to cancel the Pence deal, but did cancel one with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, in response to Jan. 6. In 2020, several Hachette employees unsuccessfully threatened to stop work on a project by J.K. Rowling, whose books were once defended by liberals against censorship from the Christian Right, because of her position on trans issues. If in-house censorship attempts in publishing can be occasionally successful even when the books are authored by already famous (and likely more profitable) writers or public figures, it’s reasonable to suspect the odds are even worse for new or lesser-known writers. Although impossible to calculate, the situation seems dire enough to have created a cottage industry of publishing books that are controversial whether because of their content or their author, with smaller presses such as Skyhorse Publishing leading the way. Hopefully, this industry will grow, although the monopolization of the publishing industry and the ideological zeal of those inside it will undoubtedly limit these prospects.
Even if a book can manage to get published, it might be unlisted by the country’s largest marketplace for literature. Amazon’s policy on unlisting books is vague, and often incoherent. It has removed certain white supremacist books including The Turner Diaries and former Klan leader David Duke’s entire bibliography, but Mein Kampf is still available. It also removed conservative political philosopher Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. When several Republican senators wrote asking for an explanation, Amazon told them that “it will no longer sell books that “frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness,” a characterization of the book disputed by the author. Nonetheless, liberals will continue to insist that modest Christians on school boards in Tennessee are actually Nazi book-burners, all while their ideological compatriots in the publishing houses refuse to let a novel called University Thugs exist because the author happens to be the wrong shade of brown.
River Page is a writer and essayist. Find his Substack, Chain Smoking to Babylon.
