WENTZVILLE — A national campaign to ban books with themes dealing with race and gender scored a victory Thursday when the Wentzville School Board voted 4-3 to pull “The Bluest Eye†by Toni Morrison from the district’s high school libraries.
The board rejected the recommendation of a review committee of district staff and residents who said banning the book “would infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature.†The book is not part of the district curriculum.
Across the country, the push to restrict teaching about race and gender equity includes library books that conservative parents and lawmakers say are divisive and serve to indoctrinate students with a leftist ideology.
“The Bluest Eye†tells the story of a young Black girl growing up during the Great Depression who longs for blue eyes because she feels ugly and oppressed because of her skin color. Morrison, who died in 2019, said she wrote the book in the late 1960s to show the psychological damage caused by racism.
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The novel, which includes passages about incest and child rape, frequently lands on the American Library Association’s annual list of most commonly banned books.
Wentzville School Board member Sandy Garber said she did not consider her vote against “The Bluest Eye†equivalent to banning but protecting children from obscenity.
“By all means, go buy the book for your child,†she said at the board meeting. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.â€
Amber Crawford, a Wentzville parent who filed the challenge against “The Bluest Eye,†posted advice for challenges in other districts to the St. Charles County Parents Association’s Facebook group, including links to excerpts so they won’t have to read “the whole garbage book.â€
At least two conservative groups with chapters in Missouri — Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education — have led the campaign against diversity and equity initiatives in schools.
No Left Turn in Education features that it deems inappropriate because they “demean our nation and its heroes, revise our history, and divide us as a people for the purpose of indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology.†Nearly every book on the list features either Black or LGBTQ characters.
Free speech organizations, including state and national library associations, describe the current push to ban books as the biggest such assault in decades.
“In my twenty years with the (American Library Association), I can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis,†Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement last month.
The National Coalition Against Censorship denounced the attacks on the books in a December statement signed by hundreds of authors and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, the National LGBTQ Task Force and the National Black Justice Coalition.
While the book ban in Wentzville is unique in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ area, several other local school districts have encountered recent challenges to library books. Last month, the Lindbergh School Board voted to keep “Gender Queer†by Maia Kobabe in the high school library, and a review committee in the Rockwood School District rejected similar challenges to “Gender Queer†and five other books.
After a challenge to the memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue,†the Francis Howell School District’s review committee voted 11 to 1 in November to keep the book in school libraries because it “shared a positive message of hope for individuals in society.â€
Local school districts have rules allowing parents to restrict their children’s library privileges based on individual books, authors or themes. The policies for book challenges are similar, involving a review committee and subsequent vote by the school board.
The challenges are related to proposed bills in Missouri and dozens of other states that would restrict the teaching of critical race theory and other “divisive†topics on race and gender, said Heather Fleming, founder of the Missouri Equity Education Partnership and a Francis Howell parent.
“The whole point and purpose of this is to have a chilling effect on equity and equity education in our schools,†Fleming said. “We know this is about a story about a Black woman instead of scenes that are too mature, because we’re not banning Shakespeare.â€
George M. Johnson, who wrote “All Boys Aren’t Blue,†said in December at a virtual forum on free speech that critics are “taking our work completely out of context†by focusing on objectionable passages instead of the work as a whole.
“I wrote the book that I wish that I could have read when I was a young adult, struggling with my identity, struggling with trying to figure out why I was feeling the way I was feeling,†Johnson said during the forum.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.