Bowing to Tea Party pressure, Alabama State Senator Bill Holtzclaw said this week that he thinks The Bluest Eye, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's novel about a little Black girl who wishes for blue eyes, should be banned in schools. He only made this statement after GOP members criticized him for opposing a repeal of the federal Common Core standards.
The Bluest Eye is on the 11th grade reading list for the Common Core, a set of standards that has been adapted by more than 40 states.
Hotzclaw told the Alabama Media Group, "The book is just completely objectionable, from language to the content." The novel is seemingly the most controversial on the 11th grade reading list, and thus, an easy one to criticize — there have been efforts to ban it in schools and libraries since it was written in 1970. It does contain graphic scenes of forced sex (which the conservative blog Politichicks helpfully provided context-free in a post titled "(WARNING: Graphic) Common Core Approved Child Pornography").
