When a School District Pulls The Bluest Eye, It Proves Morrison's Point

On Sept. 17, the superintendent of Cobb County Schools in Georgia announced at a board meeting that The Bluest Eye was officially banned from the district. It is the 37th book pulled from Cobb libraries since 2023, and the first this year. The removal covers middle and high school media centers. capitalbnewsajc

The stated ground is three pages. The district cited pages 161 to 163, which describe a father raping his 11-year-old daughter. The superintendent read the passage aloud at the meeting. Morrison's other novels stay on the shelves. thegrioyahoo

The school board chair's position: "We have not 'banned' a single book." A book that is gone from every middle and high school library in a district has a name in English. The district chose a different one. wsbtv

The process doesn't match the reason

The district's stated concern is protecting children from content a parent didn't approve. The superintendent said the district learned of the book through conversations with superintendents in Georgia and across the country. He also said no formal review committee decides whether books are removed. Whatever you call that, it isn't a parent's complaint. yahoowsbtv

What the three pages are doing

The Bluest Eye is Morrison's first novel, published in 1970. It follows a young Black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wishes for blue eyes and blond hair amid abuse, racism, and poverty. The three cited pages are the worst thing that happens to her. The rest of the book is about why it happens. ajc

It opens with a school reading primer, the kind where everyone is white and the house is happy, and takes it apart line by line. It shows a girl taught by everything around her that she is ugly. Then it shows a community using her as the thing everyone else gets to feel better than. Claudia, one of the narrators, says so at the end. The town made itself feel beautiful standing next to Pecola's pain.

Carolyn Denard, who founded the Toni Morrison Society, says reducing the book to its most tragic scene, without the context of the rest, misreads it. capitalbnews

The district's reason names the scene. The book names the audience.

The pattern

You don't need to decide what's in anyone's heart to see the pattern. The NEA traces the first U.S. book bans to laws that made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read. Today's bans center on books that lift up Black, LGBTQ+, and Indigenous voices. A teacher quoted there says the aim is to keep ideas that threaten the status quo out of the mainstream. neanea

Not every banned book is about race. The five most banned titles of the 2024–25 school year weren't. But PEN America finds bans disproportionately hit books about race and racism, and titles by or about people of color and LGBTQ+ people. The NEA lists The Bluest Eye with Gender Queer and All Boys Aren't Blue among the most challenged books on race and gender. Cobb has also removed All Boys Aren't Blue and This Book Is Gay. The Racist Beginnings of Book Bans | NEA +3

An Ohio librarian in the NEA piece points out that a ban is the last step, after quieter ones: titles not purchased, books left off displays, complaints filed. Thirty-seven removals is what that staircase looks like from the top. nea

Why it survives

The American Library Association ranked it the 10th most challenged book in the country from 2010 through 2019. In 2022, Forsyth County, Georgia pulled it with seven other books, then returned it and most of the others after a review and a federal investigation into whether the district was creating a hostile environment for students. yahooyahoo

It keeps coming back because the book's argument is the hardest thing to answer. A novel about a community that decided a Black girl's suffering wasn't its business keeps getting removed by institutions that decide her story isn't for their students.

The Bluest Eye is about a town that looked away from a child. Removing it from the shelf is another way to look away.