A Georgia school district is back in the news for banning books. Cobb County Schools Superintendent Chris Ragsdale banned Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning book The Bluest Eye from school library shelves.
The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, tells the story of a young Black girl growing up in poverty, and dealing with racism and child incest.
She is constantly called “ugly” due to her dark skin and she develops an inferiority complex. She wishes she had blue eyes, which she believes will make her happy. The girl eventually goes insane.
In a speech during a school board meeting Thursday, Sept. 24, Ragsdale read an excerpt in which the young girl is r*ped (and impregnated) by her father.
“The words speak for themselves,” Ragsdale said. “Both as a father and as a superintendent, I think about a parent having to explain to their sixth-grade daughter after she encounters explicit descriptions of child incest and rape in a book provided at school, without parents’ knowledge. As the superintendent responsible for the instruction of 100,000 students, I do not have the luxury of making that decision for other parents and their children.”
Under the school district’s library rules, only a parent or legal guardian of a child enrolled in a district school can request a book’s removal from the library.
The Bluest Eye won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. Morrison died on August 5, 2019 at age 88.