Read Aloud Of The Bluest Eye

Girl claims assigned reading 'lost her innocence'

The Union County School District has decided to make some changes after a parent at a school board meeting read aloud sexually explicit excerpts from a book assigned to her 16-year-old daughter.

Robin Bayuk says she didn't even know her daughter was reading "The Bluest Eye," by Toni Morrison, until her daughter told her the book had made her feel like she'd "lost her innocence."

One section of the book details an 11-year-old girl being raped by her father.

"It's nothing short of pornography," Bayuk said. "It's just written."

Union County is now writing up revisions to its academic guidelines. The district will now require teachers to notify parents about books with explicit themes before the books are ever suggested to students on required reading lists.

"It's spineless," Bayuk said.

She says the change isn't sufficient because it puts the onus of book screening on parents, when the school should know better than to assign books with such graphic writing.

"They need to take it off the list," she said.

The list Bayuk referenced is compiled by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

Officials there said books are chosen because they are tools to teach core curriculum. However, neither DPI nor the Union County School District would identify which core curriculum "The Bluest Eye" would be used for.

Interview With Novelist Sapphire and Bookworm Host Michael ...

. I thought it was so great, I was crying when I read it. And I wondered, ‘why hasn’t anyone told me that this was really literature?’ This isn’t just something that became a movie, or that was there because of race.

I think both of these books will be part of the American legacy. The history of American literature is a history of our people telling their own story. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Saul Bellow or Amy Tan. Literature is always one generation after another of people who get to step up and tell the story honestly, and with the respect for what literature is. And that is what I think Sapphire has done.”

Sapphire:  “At the time when I wrote  Push , the stereotype of the obese black woman turns out to be a story of a precious child. So you take the stereotype and you crack it open. You got to get to the blood and the guts and the heart of the story. The stereotypes are there; it’s not our job to avoid them. Our job is to open up the stereotype so we can find the human being inside who has been lost and negated by it.

“Specifically,  Push  is about the acquisition of language. In the beginning, Precious quotes society’s view of her—she says, “don’t nobody want me, don’t nobody need me.” And by the end of the book, she’s able to say, ‘I’m somebody, I’m worth educating. I’m worth having a life. I’m Precious.” And that is a 3-dimensional picture, as opposed to a stereotype.

“Think of [the stereotyping of] welfare and the intense hostility toward people on welfare. There is this idea that people on welfare are ‘sucking the system dry.’ But, of course, we know about British Petroleum, we know about the bailouts—the multi-billion dollar bailouts; this is who’s undermining the economic base of America, on some level. But when these guys get up in their 4-piece suits, or whatever they’re wearing (laughs), we don’t look at them as ‘sucking the lifeblood’ of this country through their criminal activities. Yet we turn to a family that is maybe getting $140 every two weeks and some food stamps, trying to educate themselves and trying to get the medication they need—and we talk about them sucking the system’s blood.