My School Board Sends Book Banners Packing
The Kern High School District last night voted down a petition to ban Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eyes." The mother who is leading the fight for the ban gathered 750 signatures, started her own book-banning website, and vows to keep up the fight. From the Bakersfield Californian story:

Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is a 200-page novel about a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, her abusive family and the 1940s America around her. Pecola desperately wishes for blue eyes so she can be beautiful. In a drunken fit of desperation, her father rapes and impregnates Pecola. After she miscarries, the 11-year-old slowly spins into insanity.

The controversy started almost three months ago, when East High teacher Jean Nilssen assigned the novel to her 11th grade honors English class. Porter's daughter, Sarah, brought the book home to her mother and said it made her uncomfortable.

"The Bluest Eye" describes a woman's orgasm, Pecola's rape by her father and a husband making unpleasurable love to his listless wife. It wasn't the events themselves that irritated Porter, she said, it was the graphic details Morrison included.

"Knowing about incest and pedophilia is not the same thing as knowing what happens to a man's anatomy when he's raping his daughter," she said Monday night.

Porter says the book is obscene. Whether "great literature" or not, it's inappropriate for children, she said. Besides, she added, teachers are not counselors -- they're not qualified to guide students through a discussion of rape, sex and incest.

Porter was offered an alternate assignment, as is policy, administrators said.

But Porter wasn't satisfied. She didn't want any students reading the book in class. She filed a formal complaint with the district, forcing Hatcher to create a committee to review the novel. She also wrote a letter to the district accusing Nilssen of sexual harassment by assigning the novel.

Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a copy of "The Bluest Eyes," doesn't it? And in case you don't know, the Kern High School District is where I got my small-town public high school education. It's also where my mom worked as an English teacher until she retired just a few years ago.
- posted by Amy @ 2/03/2004 01:52:00 PM