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The Bluest Eye Controversy

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Recommended: Issues in toni morrison's Beloved

Tarek Dia Professor Rose Mass Media & Society 25 September 2015 The Bluest Eye The bluest eye is the first novel written by Howard University professor Toni Morrison. It is set in the years following the great depression and depicts the life of a misunderstood and mistreated young black girl name Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is let in by the MacTeer’s as a temporary foster child after her unsound father, Cholly, burned down their family home. She grew up with parents that fought often and a protestant white community that was not accepting of her. For these reasons and others Pecola develops an inferiority complex and longs to have blue eyes and white skin to be beautiful and accepted like the other girls. For indefinite reasons Pecola’s drunk …show more content…

There has been controversy surrounding the book since the 1970’s. It wasn’t until 2013 that the book ranked “ No. 2 on the banned book list” (Fayetteville Observer). This is because the president of the Ohio board of education deemed its depiction of sexual abuse unsuitable for high school students. School systems haven’t been the only organizations to challenge Mrs. Morrison’s book. “The book was challenged in a high school in Livingston County, Mich., because of its strong sexual content. In response to a request from the president of the Livingston Organization for Values in Education (LOVE), a conservative social activist group”( Top 10 Book Controversies, The Bluest …show more content…

To me it doesn’t make sense to censor or ban a book because you don’t agree with it or its content. The main reasons organizations and risk-adverse school board members want these kinds of books out of the school system is because they are uncomfortable with the situations and content in the book themselves. Why? Most likely since they were never taught about these situations and circumstances in their highschools and are now grown-ups who aren’t comfortable with these kinds of topics. When in reality these situations actually happen and need to be talked about. The classroom is a great place to talk about these circumstances such as rape and abuse because a teacher can help guide the students through it and really bring the teaching and meaning of the books to life. I do mean real life because once they graduate from high school these former students will possibly find themselves in situations or learning about topics similar in nature. Without this new dimension of comprehension provided to the students by reading bold novels they would grow up with an acute focus/image in life and be influenced more easily by outlandish statements such as Debe

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Likewise, Morrison also uses symbolism for the duration of the novel to establish how people can judge a person based on their economic standing. For instance, symbolism is represented through the blue eyes that is repeatedly mentioned in the novel. The blue eyes represent the idealistic white middle class life that Pecola dreams of having since white people commonly have blue eyes. The reader can infer this suggestion because whenever Pecola is experiencing bad things she wishes to have blue eyes. Morrison writes, "If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different and Mrs. Breedlove too…Each night, without fail, she prayed for the blue eyes…

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