Today in banning books: _Beloved_

[minoanmiss]

https://slate.com/culture/2021/10/beloved-glenn-youngkin-ad-toni-morrison-book-banning.html

Am I being unfair to summarize Laura Murphy's reaction as "this book made my son feel emotions and it's about Black people, so we need to be rid of it"?

(Not least because I am involved in a discussion about writing, emotional impact, and censorship) this is really interesting to me. _Hiroshima_ gave me intermittent nightmares for about a year. _Night_ also gave me nightmares for months. _Beloved_ made me cry buckets and buckets and I've never finished it. These books have some important things to say, which is their power. The reaction to wipe them off the face of the world is really interesting in a pathological way. I wonder if the demographics of the challengers matter here -- if this is a matter of well to do conservative White people who are upset at seeing the US challenged then having a "kill the heretic" reaction towards such books?

I liked the notes in the article that people don't seek to ban "mainstream" books nearly as often as "diverse" books, and the gross insult in suggesting a book by Ben Milquetoast Carson to swap in for a book like _Beloved_.

Comments

[lilysea]

Am I being unfair to summarize Laura Murphy's reaction as "this book made my son feel emotions and it's about Black people, so we need to be rid of it"?

Well, that certainly seemed to be behind the desire to ban Alice Walker's novel The Colour Purple from US schools a few years ago... :(

[conuly]

Am I being unfair to summarize Laura Murphy's reaction as "this book made my son feel emotions and it's about Black people, so we need to be rid of it"?

No, and what really pisses me off is that you just know that if we were talking about how Tom Sawyer made a younger Black child feel it'd be "Well, feelings aren't as important as facts" and "you can't change history" and all that other bullshit.

[lynnenne]

So true!

[watersword]

That is 100% a fair reading of Murphy's position. Butler's KINDRED is one of the most upsetting books I've ever read, and I occasionally try to re-read it and end up so distressed I've never actually gotten through a second complete reading, but that's on me, and I have in fact recommended it (with trigger warnings) because I think it's incredibly good and powerful.

[kore]

Kindred is fucking amazing and also brutal to read, totally one of those books that will painfully rewire your brain and is entirely worth it. Most of Butler is like that!

[lilysea]

Am I being unfair to summarize Laura Murphy's reaction as "this book made my son feel emotions and it's about Black people, so we need to be rid of it"?

It also reminds me of all the calls to ban The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian which seemed to be "this book made my child feel emotions and it's about Native Americans and how white people being racist is bad"

People kept saying "no, it's the one tame masturbation reference! No, it's the swearing!"

but when people went "...but you're fine with these other books about white teens having sex/swearing... ?"

*crickets*

[This was long before the sexual harassment allegations about Sherman Alexie came to light, so it wasn't about those]

[conuly]

To be fair, not that I particularly *want* to be fair to these people, lots of them really aren't "fine" with other books about white teens having sex, masturbating, and/or cursing. These complaints come up pretty regularly about books for those age group, even when all the characters are cis-straight non-immigrant whites.

That's why it's such an effective smokescreen for those few who really do care about the racism part but don't care at all about the sex stuff but also know that spelling it out clearly wouldn't work.

[julian]

_Beloved_ is absolutely a hard book to read. *That's the point*.

In general, I'm OK if A Given Person can't finish A Given Emotionally Hard Book, especially if they can identify why; I'm not OK if they/the system then *try and ban it* and/or remove it from consideration. Difficult emotions teach us things! Honest! Useful things, even!

[lemonsharks]

There are sometimes cases of competing access needs ang i can say with near complete confidence this is not one of them.

(I was assigned Farewell to Manzanar in middle school and while it did not give me nightmares it was the first real interaction I’d had with media that was critical of the US government and it shook my worldview. As was, I suspect, the intent.)

[baranduin]

You are not being unfair at all. Books (and some movies) like the ones you mention are so raw and unvarnished that they make us feel real feelings (as opposed to what I think of as movie feelings which can make us cry but in a pleasurable, removed from reality way). I saw the movie Beloved before I read the book and was so upset I ran out to get the book right away since I needed to read Ms. Morrison's actual words. I knew it was going to upset me in a real way but it was important to me to read the words and feel those feelings, which were not and never going to be even a little close to what the real people who went through these experiences felt. But it was important. It was the same with the movie 12 Years a Slave though I do not think I can ever watch that again.

[corvidology]

There are books and films that are so powerful, brilliant and yes, upsetting that I will never willingly read or watch them again.

That said, I'm so fucking glad I read them/saw them as so many of them changed my view of the world and my place in it.

[kore]

The campaign ad for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin features an older blond woman, wringing her hands and telling a story about a book that her son had to read for school—one that was so upsetting, so explicit, that her “heart sunk” to think of it. Internet sleuths didn’t have to look far to find out that the woman was Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County conservative activist; the son is Blake Murphy, who’s now 27 and works for the National Republican Congressional Committee; the traumatizing reading was done almost a decade ago; and the explicit book was Toni Morrison’s much-decorated masterpiece, Beloved.

OMFG (and wtf, "decorated"? That makes it sound like a Christmas tree or a general's chest full of medals)

Beloved is not challenged nearly as much as The Bluest Eye, but that’s because The Bluest Eye is read in non-AP classes, unlike Beloved, which is an AP book. So Beloved got challenged in ’96, ’97, ’98, 2006, twice in 2007, 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2016.

Jesus.

[libitina]

I was just coming here to cite that article about how calculated and political the timing of her objection is.

She is being 100% racist and providing a fake argument to support ongoing racist indoctrination

[kore]

It's just reminding me of that billionaire Republican asshole politician who recently said "Joe Biden is keeping my mom from putting food on the table!" and it turns out 1) he scammed millions from Medicare and 2) his mom is dead. Like, the lie is just INSULTINGLY bad. (Her moppet dealt with the trauma okay for a DECADE before she cried about how Toni Morrison upset her precious white male baby? WTF?)

[oracne]

OH NO HER SON HAD TO CONFRONT HIS OWN PRIVILEGE THAT CANNOT BE ALLOWED

*spits*

[branna]

That pretty much sums it up.

[amaebi]

Militant illiterate people.

I liked it better before the rocks had been lifted so high.

[sabotabby]

You are not being unfair at all. Admitted I laughed at the "snowflake" comment because all these people are FREEZED PEACH until they read something that makes them personally uncomfortable.

I mean, of course Beloved made me feel upset and uncomfortable—it's an upsetting and uncomfortable book about horrible things, which is why it's so important.

[cjsmith]

Chiming in to agree that upsetting and uncomfortable is 100% appropriate about horrible things, and it's important to have that kind of message out there. When the truth is what's ugly, don't blame the book. Laud the messenger for being willing to bear witness.

[lunabee34]

Your read of that situation is absolutely spot on, and it's disgusting.

I find Beloved very upsetting. I find Douglass's autobiography very upsetting. I find Jacobs's narrative very upsetting. I teach them anyway (not Beloved; it's too long for my freshman writing courses and not easily excerpted). I should be uncomfortable. Students should be uncomfortable. We should confront that discomfort. I also teach Malcolm X's essay about learning to read in prison and the way he discovered the brutality of slavery as an adult in the mid-20th century and what that means for the way he was (not) educated and what that means for the way we still (do not) talk about racism and racial atrocity (and then I talk about the Tulsa massacre and how I had to learn about that from Lovecraft Country or the lynching of a Jewish man in Atlanta in 1915 that I learned about recently or the recent uncovering of the atrocities at the boarding schools for indigenous peoples in US and Canada).

That lady is a racist jackass who doesn't want her child to confront racism.

I will say that I am sympathetic to an individual child being upset by a text or film and having intrusive thoughts or nightmares, but the answer to that is not to ban the text.

[minoanmiss]

The nice thing about being overly generous in my phrasing is watching everyone else's awesome condemnations of this terrible racist woman. beams