Opinion: Book Bans & Beloved

By: Katie Harbaugh

My AP Language & Composition class just finished reading Beloved, by Toni Morrison. As a follow up, we watched her 2019 documentary, The Pieces I Am. While watching the film, it stuck out to me the most when Toni Morrison said (rough quote): “Parents have the right to decide what their children are allowed to read. But they do not have the right to decide what my children are and are not allowed to read.” This resonated with me, and I’m sure it did with everyone else in the room, because of how relevant the concept of “book-banning” has become today. Freshman year when we read Fahrenheit 451, that concept seemed possible only in an obviously dystopian world. But today, schools around us are banning books left and right, and sometimes it really does feel as though we are living in a dystopia described by Ray Bradbury.

When it comes to Beloved, and other “controversial” novels, I can almost understand where concerned groups are coming from. While I don’t sympathize with the movement itself, I can see how it might be scary to know that your kids are reading about graphic, explicit, and/or violent historical matters–and it is a parent’s job to protect their kids from seeing that, right? Wrong. That is history, and history is graphic and explicit and violent. Writer Farah Jasmine Griffith from the Washington Post says it best, responding to claims about Beloved’s “obscenity” by saying that “If her novel is “obscene,” that is because the institution of slavery was obscene” (1). Learning about history through an uncensored lense is the only way to truly understand its horrors, and is one of the most powerful tools we have in deterring anyone from repeating that past.

As for how books like Beloved actually get banned in schools, a common theme that I have noticed is that all of the “reasons” for banning those books seem to be code for other, more discriminatory motives. “Critical race theory,” while widely NOT taught in schools, has become code for “anything that acknowledges that racism exists and was/is a real issue.” Besides its themes of discussing racism and the horrors of slavery, Beloved has also been targeted for being “sexually explicit.” Sharon Robertson was quoted in a related piece from CBS News, saying "’Beloved is one of the best examples of that — that's in the headlines right now — it isn't pornographic or obscene, it just deals with sex,’” (2). Now that I’ve read the book, I can say my piece about what I think this really means. The novel discusses sex and rape, the latter of which was horrifyingly commonplace in the institution of slavery. Ignoring this aspect of history would be to ignore the intensity of the violence committed against enslaved black people, and enslaved black women especially. 

I attended PSR (Parish School of Religion) classes for a good portion of my life, where we studied the Bible and its teachings, and I can easily say that the Bible’s content is far more graphic, violent, and explicit than anything mentioned in Beloved. Yet, no one is trying to ban the Bible alongside Toni Morrison’s novel which gives a horrifying but realistic portrayal of slavery. Based on this, it appears that banning books is almost never a step in the right directionand that usually these bans are rooted in fear and discrimination.

Sources: 

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Documentary, 2019 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/28/beloved-toni-morrison-virginia/ (1)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banned-books-beloved-controversy-critical-race-theory/ (2)

& Beloved, Toni Morrison