Chicago Public Schools was first to ban the popular graphic novel Persepolis,” in 2013.
The book has sold millions of copies. The author, Marjane Satrapi, was born in Iran and used the book to tell her story. Chicago school officials decided to pull the book from classrooms and school libraries, after receiving complaints that the book was not “age-appropriate.” The officials saw two pages that circulated among them. There is no indication that any of them actually read the book. The Superintendent at the time was Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who was subsequently sent to prison for accepting bribes to buy services from vendors.
A graduate student asked for copies of internal emails about the decision to remove the book:
News of the ban broke on March 14, 2013, when a local education blogger got hold of an email from the principal of Lane Tech College Prep High School which informed teachers and staff that he had been directed in no uncertain terms to collect all copies of Persepolis from the school’s library and classrooms. He was given no explanation for the sudden purge, he said.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett started backpedaling later that day, after teachers and students raised objections and local media began asking questions. Byrd-Bennett revised the directive in another email to principals, saying that “we are not requesting that you remove Persepolis from your central school library.” But the book was still banned from seventh grade classrooms and “under review” for use in eighth through tenth grades. Teachers of college-level AP classes for 11th and 12th grade students would be allowed to retain the book in their curricula.
Unsurprisingly, Byrd-Bennett’s “clarification” did little to assuage the concerns of teachers and especially students, who organized a demonstration outside Lane Tech on March 15. By then, CPS was receiving national press coverage and stern rebukes from free speech groups, including CBLDF through the NCAC’s Kids’ Right to Read Project. In response to the growing furor, district spokesperson Becky Carroll claimed that “the message got lost in translation, but the bottom line is, we never sent out a directive to ban the book…. We’re not saying remove these from buildings altogether.”
Allan Singer, a professor of social studies education at Hofstra College in New York, wrote at Daily Kos about the recent decision by the Commack School Board to ban Persepolis.
He writes, in part:
The city of Persepolis was founded by Persian Emperor Darius I in 518 B.C. as a religious center and the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The Persian Empire was defeated by Alexander the Great and Greek armies about 330 B.C. and the city was burned. Today its ruins are located in southwestern Iran and are considered one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites.
Persepolis lived again in the graphic arts book Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Graphic Library 2004) by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was born in Iran and grew up in the current capital city, Tehran. Her parents were leftwing political activists and after the 1979 Islamic revolution they arranged for her to move to Vienna, Austria when she was fourteen. She later returned to Iran where she studied Visual Communication and earned a Master’s Degree from Islamic Azad University in Tehran. At the age of 24, Satrapi left Iran to live in France.
Her black-and-white 341-page graphic novel Persepolis is autobiographical and recounts Satrapi’s experiences from age six to fourteen, including surviving a missile attack and learning about torture. The New York Times named it a Notable Book and Time Magazinecalled it the “Best Comix of the Year” for 2004.
Because the book includes a realistic pictorial depiction of torture and as part of the new rightwing assault on multiculturalism and anything that even suggests association with critical race theory, Persepolis is under attack and its educational supporters are threatened with retribution. At a recent Commack, New York school board meeting high school students and alumni protested against the removal of the book from 11th grade English classes. It has been an assigned text for more than a decade. Students from Islamic and South Asian backgrounds pointed out that it is the only place that someone like them appears in the entire 7-12 English Language Arts curriculum. Speakers who were also attacking Critical Race Theory demanded that Persepolis be dropped as “pornographic.”
If you want to learn more about the censorship of textbooks and books used in schools, read my book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for your relentless fight against censorship, Diane!!!
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Reblogged this on dean ramser.
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Really curious what the objection was to this book. Wonder if it is because the context of the story hints at the complicated US involvement with Iran? That’s something that needs to be covered up just like the history of slavery and Jim Crow and confiscation of native Americans’ land in this country. Or maybe because the writer is an intelligent young Iranian woman, and that contradicts stereotypes? Or maybe because her parents were leftists and she didn’t denounce them for it? I doubt the mention of torture and executions is the problem, or that there’s something about sex in the book somewhere. (Is there? I don’t recall.)
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Contradicting stereotypes: that really seems to cause such a huge stir these days
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Censoring “Persepolis” is bad, but — unfortunately — only a minor problem in comparison to the use of lying textbooks in public and private schools across our nation that have led to the head-to-head violent confrontations we see throughout our nation today.
For decades now, private and especially evangelical Christian schools throughout our nation have been brainwashing kids with a completely false history of America. A generation of children numbering in the tens of millions have grown up with a completely different fundamental understanding of America than other Americans have — and they fervently believe that their understanding of our history is correct and will defend it with force if necessary against all those who, in their view, are perverting it. We saw the tip of this in the crowds of young people who marched and fought by torchlight in Charlottesville. There are tens of millions more like them who have been churned out by private schools that have taught them a false history of America, and more are right now being indoctrinated in private schools.
You must read “The rightwing US textbooks that teach slavery as ‘black immigration’,” an analysis by The Guardian which reveals that private schools, especially Christian schools, use textbooks that tell of a version of history that is racially biased and inaccurate.
Another “must-read” was published in the New York Times on January 12, 2020, titled “Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories” by Dana Goldstein. It gives you a side-by-side comparison of the same American History book used in California and Texas and graphically shows how the books fundamentally differ because of editing demanded by the Texas state board of education which completely changes the American History that Texas children learn from that learned by California children.
Because of this rewriting of history in textbooks used in private schools across our nation, we have become a nation of people who NO LONGER SHARE A COMMON HERITAGE. We are fundamentally and bitterly divided.
What can be done to require that a single and accurate account of American History will be taught to children in every state?
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The Koch network is very influential in promoting a sanitized version of our country’s history. One of their agendas includes censorship of “offensive materials.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/08/11/koch-network-infiltration-public-schools-harms-students-teachers-and-our-democracy
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We need to avoid words like “sanitized” when discussing issues like this. There is nothing clean, presentable or acceptable here. These are ideologically-driven and fabricated lies. They are beyond the definition of distortion. They are lies and should be referred to as such in all company, polite or not.
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Persepolis was recommended to me by my dear, late friend Roza Efkateri, a feminist journalist in exile, as the best depiction of growing up in Iran available in English. I read it and was very moved. Shame on these knee jerk administrators for not caring about their students understanding of the lives of others, especially girls.
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My daughter found this book meaningful, thought-provoking, and generally depressing. I can assure you she is not disturbed.
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That this book was banned means it must be taught. This becomes a teacher’s duty.
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I tend to agree with this (until or unless I change my mind about a particular situation since I’m not afraid of being hypocritical in times of need). Imagine what a rich, wonderful class it would be just to choose and discuss works that have been or are banned. One could make a great world or American history, literature, music, or jointly taught course.
I’ve longed to be able to go back to the classroom to teach a semester course on Entartete music of the Third Reich and the people both behind it and the perpetrators who made the judgments that these works were “degenerate.” A number of years ago London Records did a fantastic series of works by composers who had been banned and escaped and others who were executed. Much of our modern film music comes out of these composers–Waxman, Krenek, Korngold–and others whose works were lost to history until London brought them back to life. Like Ullman’s piece, written on the train to Auschwitz and later smuggled out. Perhaps if we are going to start requiring courses, we should think about requiring one on this.
Recently I’ve learned a lot about the guitar blues of the Saharan region, music that has been banned in Niger, like that of Tinariwen, whose leader saw his father executed. Banning of books, art, etc. is a sign of an immature, weak society, one that is afraid of confronting reality and dealing with it.
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I would dearly love to sit in that course on Entartete music! Maybe you could do this online? I would pay to sit in this course. These composers you mention–brilliant. Thank you.
I don’t know if I have asked you this, Greg, but do you play an instrument yourself?
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Greg: Banned stuff in the Nazi era is a fascinating study. Several artists, including Eric Karl of the Hungry Catepiller was one of those, I believe. Never heard of the music, but I would like to know more
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I do not play an instrument but love most types of music. Not familiar with Hungarian composer. Here’s an article I found about the London Records project prior to its first release:
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1993-04-28-0000102762-story.html
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Greg,
Thank you for your excellent comment on censorship. It’s a brilliant idea to teach a course consisting of banned works of literature and music. Some years back, I saw a traveling exhibition, called “Degenerate Art,” paintings that had been banned by the Third Reich. Beautiful objects, mostly by German Jews and dissidents.
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One of my favorite books—whose name I can’t recall at the moment—showed doctored photographs from the Soviet era. As a leader fell out of favor and was executed, his image disappeared from subsequent photos of the Politbureau.
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The book about the Soviet practice of erasing discredited (and assassinated) leaders from official photographs is titled “The Commissar Vanishes.” Here is an article about it: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-photo-book-that-captured-how-the-soviet-regime-made-the-truth-disappear
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I am pretty sure I used that book or one with a similar theme to build a lecture for my government class about how anti-intellectualism and historical revisionism are two clear characteristics of totalitarian dictatorships and puts in writing what those Stalinist “photographs” showed. Although I have posted it a few times here, I hope my friends here will indulge me again as I quote the opening of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. One of the questions on my final exam was to ask them to comment on this and its implications:
“In February 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address the hundreds and thousands of his fellow citizens packed into Old Town Square. It was a crucial moment in Czech history—a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice in a millennium.
“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing next to him. There were snow flurries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. The solicitous Clemintis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald’s head.
“The Party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photograph of that balcony with Gottwald, a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums.
“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where Clementis once stood, there is only a bare palace wall. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head.”
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I kind of get that some parents might worry about exposing kids to the subject of torture [although for 11th-graders that seems excessive, especially since they’ve learned about slavery]. But.. how is this graphic novel something that “suggests association with critical race theory”? Likewise, how does the memoir of a French resident raised in Iran relate to bugaboos rw Americans have with ‘multiculturalism’? Asking seriously. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if that’s what this is about, my only conclusion is that—at least in Commack, LI– whatever rw loudmouths complain about in the curriculum is ditched, no matter how nonsensical the complaint. [And defender’s position as district English head—abolished?! Just nuts.]
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I thought W said torture was mission accomplished as long as you just called it enhanced interrogation. Enhanced interrogation is misunderestimated. “Is our children learning” is the question, anyhow. But, what do I know? I’m not the decider. I just work to help my students put food on their family. No hypocrisy or stupidity here, move along.
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lol! Ah, remembering the good ole daze!
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All in the (Bush) Family
Boy, the way Decider brayed
Testing made the hit parade
No Child Left to have it made
Those were the daze
Didn’t know who Koch was then
IEDs on CNN
Mister, we should not elect a Bush man ever again
Didn’t have no welfare state
Everybody pulled their weight
Except those with hurricanes
Those were the daze!
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This event happened back in 2013/2014 under the reign of Barbara Byrd Bennett then CEO of CPS. She was later indicted https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2020/5/6/21249044/barbara-byrd-bennett-leaves-prison-chicago-public-schools-ceo and just recently got released.
In any case, in the Rahm Emanuel era, he managed to eliminate almost all of the CPS librarians especially those in high schools where this book and many other important books would be found in most schools so the issue is a moot point.
Schoool libraries are the only places in schools that have collection development policies and defend children’s rights to read books about race, homosexuality, science, politics, religion- in other words anything remotely controversial. It’s up to individual teachers now in almost all CPS high schools.
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