Leading up to Banned Books Week 2012, ALA will highlight one book from its new timeline of banned and challenged books each day. Today we feature the year 1994 and “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison.
“The Bluest Eye” was pulled from an eleventh grade classroom at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, AK in 1994 by school administrators because “it was a very controversial book; it contains a lot of very graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing language.” The same year, it was challenged at the West Chester, PA schools as “most pornographic” and banned from the Morrisville, PA Borough High School English curriculum, after complaints about its sexual content and objectionable language. “The Bluest Eye” is among the best known works of distinguished author Toni Morrison, whose awards and honors include the Nobel Prize in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
For more information about Banned Books Week, please visit www.ala.org/bbooks.
2 comments
It’s amazing how those who have been victims of others’ perverted and abusive actions relish reading about and reliving their own trauma. Just because incest, abuse, and pedophilia affect some, doesn’t mean we have to expose minors’ imaginations and minds to raw descriptions of it all. They will never be better human beings for having read this crap. And those idiots who endorse this same crap will reap the benefits when society’s minds are full of sex and violence and conservatism is yearned for.