Georgia school system abruptly bans Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’

Georgia’s second-largest school district is once again at the center of a political controversy over the appropriateness of school materials.

Cobb County Schools Superintendent Chris Ragsdale announced the district is removing copies of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” from school library shelves.

The novel tells the tragic story of a young Black girl dealing with racism, poverty and abuse.

In a speech during a school board meeting Thursday, Ragsdale read aloud from a scene in which the protagonist is raped by her father.

“The words speak for themselves,” Ragsdale said. “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. 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.”

Library and free speech advocates reject the removal.

Georgia Library Media Association advocate and retired school librarian Nan Brown said the district appears not to have followed the proper procedure under a 2022 law which created pathways for removing books that start with guardian complaints and must follow a review process.

“The Cobb County Schools superintendent seems to be saying, ‘I don’t have to go by policy,’ she said. “If I was a Cobb parent, I would be very concerned because if he is going to bypass that policy, what other policies will he be comfortable bypassing?”

Under the district’s library rules, “Only a parent or legal guardian of a student currently enrolled in a District school” may initiate a request for materials to be removed, but during the school board meeting, Ragsdale said the district became aware of the book “through conversations with superintendents in Georgia and across the country.” A district spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the procedures that led to the book being removed.

In 2022, Forsyth County removed eight books, including “The Bluest Eye,” but ended up returning it and most of the others after a review process and after the feds launched an investigation into whether the district was creating a hostile environment for students.

Brown said the book did not meet the standard three-pronged test for obscenity called the Miller Test: whether the work taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest, whether it depicts sexual conduct or bodily functions in a “patently offensive way” and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Brown said “The Bluest Eye” is widely recognized as having great literary value and the scene Ragsdale focused on treats the rape as a brutal act.

“It’s violence,” she said. “It’s not titillating. It’s violence.”

Some Cobb County parents expressed bewilderment at the way the district announced the ban, reporting that they received notifications on their phones that contained the explicit passage Ragsdale referenced with a content warning.