Working-class Colton got rare and unwanted national attention earlier this year by banning a Toni Morrison novel, “The Bluest Eye,” from its high school reading list.
Merits of the decision aside, banning a book by a beloved Black author during Black History Month was a bad look. As I said at the time, the school board must have been trying to give itself the blackest eye.
PEN America, which champions free expression, was all set to revisit the issue for Banned Books Week, which began Sept. 27. Late last month the New York City-based advocacy group wrote to the Colton Joint Unified School District.
“We urge you to reinstate the book as soon as possible,” the cover letter read in part.
Colton was a step ahead of PEN. The board president wrote back to say the ban had been dropped a month earlier.
The three-page open letter planned for PEN’s website was, like a book, quietly shelved.
“We’re glad. This was a book that was singled out for exclusion. It was a mistake to exclude it to begin with. We are glad the school board saw fit to reverse itself,” James Tager, PEN’s deputy director of free expression research and policy, told me Tuesday morning.
Tager said PEN focused on Colton because of the publicity the original decision had received and because the city isn’t far from the organization’s Los Angeles chapter.
The Sun had broken the story of the book ban, news that other L.A. media jumped on. But in the midst of wildfires and a public health crisis, the reversal had passed us all by. It’s a fresh reminder of why it’s important to support local news and what happens when enough people don’t: Stories don’t get covered.
The school board on Aug. 20 approved core and extended reading lists for grades 7 to 12, the same thing it had done in February, except Morrison’s book was restored and five more titles were added, district spokeswoman Katie Orloff told me.
The book selection committee refined its selection process, increased parent representation, improved the opt-out process and added more diverse authors, Orloff explained.
Out of 18 comments by the public, nine wanted “The Bluest Eye” back and nine wanted it gone for good, according to the meeting minutes.
The board’s vote was 5-2 to restore the book, with two members — Patt Haro and Frank Ibarra — reversing themselves, Dan Flores and Bertha Arreguin continuing to support the book, Israel Fuentes voting “yes” rather than abstaining as in February, and Joanne Thoring-Ojeda and Berenice Sandoval still opposed.
It’s as if the school board held a book club discussion. All that was missing were tea and ginger snaps.
Tager told me one reason Colton’s reversal is good news for teachers, librarians and parents across the country is that it shows such battles can be won.
“It’s never too late to reverse a book ban,” Tager said. “It’s never too late to fight a book ban.”
As a book lover, it’d be easy for me to get on my high horse, but that’s not a place I’m comfortable. For one thing, heights make me nervous. Also, I haven’t read the novel, and I’m not an educator or parent.
That said, my default position echoes what underground cartoonist R. Crumb once said about art: “It’s only lines on paper, folks!”
“The Bluest Eye” was never removed from Colton school libraries, only from the list of books that could be taught. It’s restricted to high school juniors and seniors in Advanced Placement English courses.
It’s quite a list, by the way: 500 books, most of them literary classics.
I count 19 Shakespeare plays, and see not only such staples as “The Scarlet Letter” and Anne Frank but challenging fare like “Moby Dick,” “Les Miserables” and “Crime and Punishment,” which I only read myself last summer.
Authors on the list include Amy Tan, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Euripides, Homer, Ibsen, Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Margaret Atwood, Pablo Neruda and Sandra Cisneros, to name only a few.
Are students today really being assigned such heavyweight stuff? I’m impressed. I could happily spend the rest of my life knocking off Colton’s 500 books.
Incidentally, not only is John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” on the list, so is a satirical story from The Onion headlined “Girl Moved to Tears by ‘Of Mice and Men’ Cliffs Notes.” (She says: “I never wanted the synopsis to end.”)
Two other Morrison books are on the list: “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.”
As for “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison’s debut, it’s about an 11-year-old Black girl in the 1940s who is raped and impregnated by her own father. She prays every day for blond hair and blue eyes, which she thinks would make her beautiful.
That’s poignant. Writers of color, and books reflecting LGBTQ experiences, are often challenged, Tager told me, even though “there’s an urgent need for exploring across different cultural experiences.”
“High school students don’t need to be babied; they need to learn how to navigate our messy, complicated world,” PEN wrote in its open letter to the district.
Some parents took issue with the novel’s depiction of pedophilia and sexual violence. I wonder, have any of them read Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” which is likewise on Colton’s list? The action includes incest, patricide, suicide and self-harm.
But there’s a reason people have been reading Sophocles for 2,400 years. And there’s a reason Morrison won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel. She was a member of PEN America, by the way.
brIEfly
Miguel Santana, the departing president and CEO of the LA County Fair, has a new gig. He will lead the Weingart Foundation, a philanthropy based in downtown L.A. Santana, a former L.A. City Hall budget officer who has worked on homelessness and lives in Pomona, starts Jan. 24. He told me he appreciates the foundation’s focus on equity and social issues. My question is whether the Weingart folks will expect him to bring cotton candy and funnel cakes to staff meetings.
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, three unhealthy snacks. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
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