ABSTRACT
They Might Be Giants (TMBG) return to the larger issues of racism and response that TANKARD also sang about, in the song that began this investigation of tolerance and Holocaust literature. Here, TMBG are compelled to respond to the “racist friend.” Rather than tolerating racist views, they end the party inhabited by the racist friend and his or her silent companion. Politics may bore many of us, particularly in the 24-hour news media age, where pundits insist on shaming those who address inequality with phrases like “playing the race/gender card.” In fact, this is one reason why we all need to stand up to that “racist friend.” It is not the marginalized group’s responsibility alone to work at reframing an unequal system. It takes a community response, a refusal to let that party go on, even if one is not being targeted oneself. The second epigraph, from Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, highlights another way to consider cosmopolitan engagement. She argues for creating civic compassion, a task that requires engagement with the arts as a method for experiencing the lives of others. She also acknowledges human behavior’s limitations and the propensity to project disgust onto popu lations labeled Other. This is where I turn in the nal chapter of Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: those “ugly practices” that embrace hate and what they can show readers
about “standing up” in light of injustice. Texts for adolescent readers featuring neo-Nazi characters can help to challenge the idea that all values are equally worthwhile and help craft a framework for response. Here, I evaluate four novels, Laura Williams and Erica Magnus’ The Spider’s Web (1999), Han Nolan’s If I Should Die Before I Wake (2003), Carol Matas’ The Freak (2002), Mats Wahl’s The Invisible (2007), and one novella, Stephen King’s “Apt Pupil” (1983). Young adult ction can help draw attention to what an individual might do when faced with difcult decisions about inequality.1
