With two children attending schools in Cobb County, Anthony Pierce feels he must double his efforts at home to ensure his kids are informed about the world and differing perspectives as their school district recently banned a 37th book from its library system.
“I think through our history we know that it’s better for people to have access to information and be able to discuss it and understand … what’s going on and what an author is trying to convey, rather than just making it something that people can’t consume,” Pierce said about the bans.
On Sept. 17, Cobb County Schools Superintendent Chris Ragsdale announced at a school board meeting that The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison was officially banned from the district. Citing sexually explicit content in the book, Ragsdale read aloud a passage from the novel where the protagonist is raped by her father.
“Both as a father and as a superintendent, I think about a parent having to explain to their sixth-grade daughter after she encounters explicit descriptions of child incest and rape in a book provided at school, without parents’ knowledge,” Ragsdale said. “As the superintendent responsible for the instruction of 100,000 students, I do not have the luxury of making that decision for other parents and their children.”
Parents, academics, and First Amendment advocates who spoke with Capital B Atlanta said the school district’s reasons for banning the The Bluest Eye misrepresent the novel as a whole. Some questioned the process in which the book was banned and noted how bans are negatively impacting school environments.
According to the district’s website, the review of books in Cobb County Schools can be initiated by a parent or district staff.
Ragsdale said his “executive Cabinet” is in charge of reviewing materials, and the final decision rests with him. He said that he did not fully read The Bluest Eye before making his decision, but read passages from the award-winning author’s work.
“I read the excerpts that were deemed to be sexually explicit,” he said.
In an email to Capital B Atlanta, a district spokesperson said the following:
“Our responsibility is to protect students, provide age-appropriate materials, and respect parents’ authority. This book contains graphic, sexually explicit material and does not meet that standard. If the passages are too explicit for newsrooms to publish, they are too explicit for unrestricted access by children in school.”
The district said that other books by Morrison remain available in Cobb County Schools.
According to the New York Public Library, The Bluest Eye faced 62 challenges in 2023 and 29 bans in the 2022-23 school year. Another Georgia school district, Monroe County, also banned the book this year.
The Bluest Eye was Morrison’s debut book. She went on to publish 11 novels, including Beloved, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 1993, Morrison was the first Black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She died in 2019.
“I’m probably a little silly, perhaps, about the banning of my books,” Morrison said in a 2009 interview with NPR. “I tend not to pay an awful lot of attention to it, most of the instances I know about fall into the category of the absurd.”
Other books Cobb County Schools has banned since 2023 include All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson. Critics of the district’s efforts claimed the books being banned are ones that center people of color and LGBTQ youth.
The district’s removal of dozens of books comes after the implementation of two state laws passed in 2022: Senate Bill 226 and Senate Bill 377. SB 226 allows parents to submit complaints about sexual content in students’ textbooks, class materials, and library books believed to be “harmful to minors.” SB 377 regulates how teachers can discuss lessons involving race and ethnicity.
Carolyn Denard, a retired Georgia State University professor of literature who founded the Toni Morrison Society and completed a doctoral dissertation on Morrison at Emory University, said while schools have the right to set their policies on what they teach, reducing The Bluest Eye to its “most tragic” scene and without context from the rest of the story misinterprets Morrison’s work.
Denard said the story examines how racism impacts people on a personal level as Pecola Breedlove, an 11-year-old Black girl who wishes for blue eyes, is failed by her family and community as internalized and systemic racism creates a cycle of trauma among the characters in the story.
“I think the real tragedy here is how The Bluest Eye is being portrayed as a novel about rape, incest, and child murder, which is how the superintendent described it, and that is not at all what the book is about,” Denard said. “I think the passage that he read was one paragraph out of over 200 pages, and it’s at the end of the novel, and it is the most extreme and monstrous example of what self-loathing and racism can do to a child and a Black man.”
Denard said that with the guidance of teachers, students can learn valuable literary and life lessons from Morrison’s novel.
“Teachers who are prepared to teach this novel, who can prepare their students for this very difficult scene, can also provide a way for students to understand, to intervene, to maybe realize things that are going on with their classmates, with, you know, in their own families … so in that way, the book can be instructive,” she said. “It’s a real check on how we value people and how we support certainly the most vulnerable — a young Black child, for whom society says repeatedly that ‘You are not beautiful, you are not worthy.’”
She added that the novel fails the Miller test, the national standard for determining whether a material is legally “obscene.”
For Pierce, the Cobb County parent, prohibiting books that deal with topics like racism creates an intolerant culture within the school system, which he feels puts his children at risk.
“It makes me worry because I feel like it fosters an environment of close minded education,” he said. “No matter what, there’s still like a whole group of people that are just gonna be falling by the wayside and my kids have to be in contact with those people at their schools, and that’s what makes me worry because I can’t control what’s going on in their households and how they’re gonna make up the ground for what they’re not being taught at school now.”
Andy Spinks, a retired Cobb County Schools librarian, said that he wasn’t surprised to learn the district banned The Bluest Eye.
Spinks, who worked at Campbell High School for 11 years, said that after the passage of SB 226 and SB 377, he saw a culture of fear and self censorship amongst faculty. A Cobb County teacher was fired after reading a book about gender identity to her fifth grade class in 2023.
He said as a librarian, the restrictions impacted his job as he felt he had to be “extremely careful” with recommending books to students.
“When you don’t have a culture of academic and intellectual freedom, and when … you don’t feel like your employer has any inclination to work with you if you accidentally step over a line, then there’s just only so much you can teach,” said Spinks, who questioned the constitutionality of the school system’s book policy. “So just having to operate out of fear limits how much you’re going to teach and how engagingly you’re going to teach it.”
Richard T. Griffiths, president emeritus of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, called Cobb County’s removal of The Bluest Eye “problematic.”
“The whole reason that we have the First Amendment is to protect controversial ideas and things that are not always pleasant or easy to read, or pleasant to understand,” Griffiths said. “Parents should be making the decision about what’s appropriate for their kids, and if a book needs to be moved to a parental permission shelf, OK. I don’t like it, but I can see it. To take the book out of the school entirely, a great piece of literature like this from a Nobel laureate, then that’s really a big problem.”
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