Recently, my daughter and I started a podcast, Classics & Coffee, where we drink coffee and discuss literature. We do five books per season, one joint selection and two book selections apiece. One of my books selections for season one was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I chose this book, partly, because I am teaching it this semester. I also chose it because it pairs well with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Both books deal with, in various ways, representation and Western ideals of beauty. Over the years, Morrison’s novel has been one of the most banned and challenged books, according to the American Library Association. Individuals challenge The Bluest Eye for its depiction of sexual abuse and because they claim it is sexually explicit.

Doing a Twitter search for “The Bluest Eye” pulls up a myriad of posts from people listing, as Tressie McMillian Cottom does, the novel as foundational in their lives. Along with these posts, others claim the book should not be made available, especially in school libraries. The Bluest Eye is written at an eighth grade reading level, but I’d agree that an eighth grade class should not read it. It is a high school (eleventh or twelfth grade) and beyond book in an educational setting.

Searching through Twitter, I came across a post that argued for the novel’s removal from school libraries. The poster shared a letter circulating in the school district that begins with the words “Child Abuse,” in bold and underlined. The headline works two ways. It does point to the sexual abuse that Pecola endures at the hands of her father, but it also lays the groundwork to argue that having The Bluest Eye in the library is akin to child abuse because it exposes children to “filth.”

The author of the flyer rails against the “filth” in The Bluest Eye, picking out two specific pages. These pages depict Cholly raping his daughter Pecola. Yes, they are graphic. Yes, they are disturbing. There is no denying that, but they aren’t “filth” and they are not part of, as the author of the flyer puts it, part of an “evil agenda” that must be stopped. As with any of these things, the author cherry picks specific passages and pages that will shock an audience and make the audience view the text as “filth” and “evil.”

The novel does not shy away from what happens to Pecola. In fact, we know what will happen in the second sentence of the novel when Claudia says, “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby.” Yet, that is not the focus of the novel. Instead, the focus is on the events and trauma that led Cholly to act the way that he does. Claudia ends the opening by telling us, “There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”

The Bluest Eye deals with the why. It deals with the structures and systems that oppress Pecola, her family, and others in the novel. These structures lead to psychological trauma because Pecola and others feel ugly, inferior to the whites in the community or even to lighter skinned African Americans. When Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda walk home with the light-skinned Maureen Peal, they get into a fight because Maureen looks upon them as inferior. Claudia says that Maureen’s words told them they “were lesser.” Her words and actions told them that because they are darker skinned they don’t matter. Pecola experiences this as well, specifically when she goes into the store and Mr. Yacobowski looks right through her as if she is invisible.

All of this, and more, causes psychological trauma. Claudia says that they hated Maureen Peal even though they knew she was not the “Enemy.” What they really hated was an undefinable “Thing.” She says, “The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her [Maureen] beautiful, and not us.” The Thing here is capitalized, it is an entity yet abstract. It is the standards of beauty that say Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola are ugly because of their dark skin. It is the ways that this seeps into the ways that others treat them. This is the core of the novel, and Cholly experiences it the Thing too.

A few pages before the ones that the flyer references, we see some of the trauma that Cholly endures. At his aunt’s funeral, when he is younger, he goes off into the woods with Darlene and they have sex. As they are having sex in the brush, some white hunters come by, shine their flashlights at the couple, and jeer at them to finish the act. Cholly feels “helpless.” Cholly’s hate turns on Darlene, not on the hunters. Days later, as he prepares to leave for Macon, the narrator says, “he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters.” He turns his hatred towards another victim of the hunters’ hatred instead of at the perpetrators of the hateful act. This deflection leads to his actions when he rapes Pecola, and when he rapes her, his memories go back to his love for Pauline, Pecola’s mother. That scene, graphic and disturbing as it is, drives home the psychological trauma of racism on Cholly and the other characters in the novel.

Morrison says she wrote the novel because she wanted to explore the impact of racism on individuals. She wanted to write a novel she wanted to read. She says she did not want to focus on “resistance”; rather, she wanted to examine “the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident. I knew that some victims of powerful self-loathing turn out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over.” Cholly embodies this, turning his hatred and anger towards those who have not done any harm to him at all. Others, such as Pecola, “collapse, silently, anonymously, with no voice to express or acknowledge it. They are invisible.”

The fear of reading a novel like The Bluest Eye doesn’t stem from the disturbing actions of Cholly or the depiction of those actions. The fear stems from what the novel shows the reader about themselves, especially white readers. The novel is an indictment of white supremacy and the psychological damage that racism, through violence, beauty standards, representation, and more, has on individuals. The fear lies in actually confronting this fact, because once one confronts it, one cannot hide behind ignorance. One must confront themselves. The guise of “protecting the children” serves as a shield from that direct confrontation with oneself that reading calls upon us to do when we pick up a book.

It is easy to hide behind arguments that claim novels such as The Bluest Eye are “child abuse” or “filth.” It is much harder to engage with them and think about what they say about ourselves and the world in which we live. One can use the smoke screen, but the smoke screen doesn’t last forever. It dissipates over time. The issues that novels such as The Bluest Eye address remain. They do not dissipate with the wind. They linger.