Excerpt from "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison for Banned Books Week 2022

For more information on Banned Books Week, visit https://bannedbooksweek.org/. American Library Association, Officer for Intellection Freedom While “diversity” is seldom given as a reason for a challenge, it may in fact be an underlying and unspoken factor: the work is about people and issues others would prefer not to consider. Often, content addresses concerns of groups who have suffered historic and ongoing discrimination. For instance, a book that often recurs in previous years’ top ten challenges is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While it has sex in it, and that's often the complaint, many other books also have sex, and are not challenged. Is the underlying motivation for the challenge racism? Sometimes, it surely is. In other cases, of course, a complaint genuinely may be about precisely what the challenger says it is. from https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/d... Toni Morrison's 1970 novel "The Bluest Eye" has been challenged many times, including Columbia County, Georgia, where I live, in 2022. This narration comes at the end of a longer passage. You can download and listen to the longer excerpt here: https://app.box.com/s/x2q6xqsseqxu3cc... Images in order of appearance Toni Morrison Lecture_013 (March 28, 2013) by Mike Strasser (United States Military Academy PAO) https://flic.kr/p/e6Fow2 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Noted psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark: 1945 ca. Washington Area Spark https://flic.kr/p/Gwjt4S https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Kenneth and Mamie Clark Doll National Park Service Photo by Visual Information Specialist Preston Webb Part of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park, Topeka, Kansas https://www.nps.gov/brvb/learn/histor... Alexandria King, Hadar Busia-Singleton, McKenzie Frye, and Brittany-Laurelle Photo: T Charles Erickson From the 2022 stage production "The Bluest Eye" by Lydia R. Diamond and Directed by Awoye Timpo, January 28 - March 26, 2022, The Huntington Calderwood/BCA, Boston, MA https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/ https://flic.kr/p/2n17J9T https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Stephanie Gainer Arts, https://www.facebook.com/sgainerfb Covers of various editions of translations of "The Bluest Eye." 29.GraffitiAlley.BaltimoreMD.8August2019 by Elvert Barnes https://flic.kr/p/2gT3aFw https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Reading by Ayman Fadel (http://twitter.com/aymanfadel)