The angry, cowardly white people are winning

Let’s assume the worst, and fight like hell, before we allow American intolerance to advance even further than it already has.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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This depiction of Art Spiegelman’s mother in a bath after she committed suicide is one of the objectionable images cited by a Tennessee school district as a reason for banning Maus.

That a Tennessee school board banned Maus has awakened a tremendous fury inside me. I’d planned on writing about it over the weekend. Other things got in the way. But that fury is still there, and I want to figure it out.

As I sat down to begin this, I did a quick look at Twitter, only to discover that Judy Blume’s coming-of-age books have begun appearing on banned books lists, and that record numbers of books are being forced out of Texas schools, many because they recount America’s history of deep racism, the struggles of queer people or contain language about sex.

One of the banned books is a children’s biography of Michelle Obama, which one Texas parent asked to have banned because “it unfairly depicts former President Donald Trump as a bully and because Obama's reflections on race gave the impression that ‘if you sound like a white girl you should be ashamed of yourself,’” NBC News reported.

The angry, cowardly white people are winning, and it is terrifying.