Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has been one of the most and banned challenged books since its debut in 1982. As The Banned Books Project points out, there have been “different reasons for the book being banned, including religious objections, homosexuality, violence, African history, rape, incest, drug abuse, explicit language, and sexual scenes.” The bans and challenges to The Color Purple, as we know, have nothing to do with the actual content of the novel. These bans and challenges arise from the fear that The Color Purple and other works hold a mirror up to those who attempt to ban the book. That mirror reflects white supremacy back at the person standing in front of it, and the white person looking at themselves in the mirror fears what the reflections says about themselves.

In 2013, Brunswick County North Carolin Commissioner Pat Sykes attempted to remove The Color Purple from local schools. Sykes called Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “Trash in, trash out,” and that “[t]o me, we should have standards for our kids.” Olivia Cole asks who Sykes means when she says, “we.” Sykes’ “we” does not refer to everyone; rather, it refers to those who uphold a system that is “both white and Christian at its core.” The Color Purple challenges this system, specifically in the ways that it addresses the impacts of white supremacy through Celie, Sofia, and others and the ways that it challenges Christianity in the United States, a Christianity that privileges whiteness.

Thinking about Sykes’ words, Cole asks, “What does whiteness seek to do but center itself? What do we do when decentered, when the mirror held before us reflects something hideous?” This is what Sykes fears. By focusing on the children, saying that the novel is “trash” and that “we should have standards for our kids,” Sykes creates a cover to keep from looking directly at herself and her role within a the system she inhabits because if she did look at her role it would upend her entire being.

Lillian Smith understood this when she wrote about “the giants and pygmies of memory, of belief” that travel with us wherever we go. We must be willing to confront these giants and pygmies and ourselves because when we do we will start to see the reality of the reflection staring back at us. We will have to confront it. We will have to face it. In facing it, we will begin to dismantle the system that supports it.

When we gaze at our reflection, we see where the giants and pygmies have grown. We can trace their roots with our fingers. We can reach deep into the image, dig into the dirt, and disconnect the roots from the soil. We can eradicate the giants and pygmies that reinforce white supremacy. We can uproot them entirely and then burn them in a pile, cleansing the reflection that stares back at us and providing a space for everyone.

By calling The Color Purple “trash,” Sykes denies Celie’s, Shug’s, Nettie’s, Sofia’s, and all of the other Black characters in the novel their right to exist within society. By extension, she denies Walker her right to exist. Walker wrote The Color Purple to provide the stories of her ancestors. She begins with an epigraph where she writes that without the spirit who informed the novel she “would have never been written.” She concludes the novel by stating, “I thank everybody in this book for coming.” The novel serves as a communal text, and more specifically as a text that says, “I am here. I exist.”

Over the course of The Color Purple, Celie moves from feeling ugly and invisible to proclaiming her existence to herself and the world. At one pont, Shug tells Celie, “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.” Shug’s self-assertion, amidst everything that she endured, proclaims her existence in the midst of a white supremacist and patriarchal society that oppresses her. Shug helps Celie come into herself and assert her own being. When she brings Celie to Memphis, Shug tells her, “I brought you here to help you and to help you get on your feet.”

By the end of the novel, Celie proclaims her existence to the world. The novel ends with her embracing the myriad of people who make up her family, a family that does not just include her blood relatives. As the gather for the Fourth of July, Celie says, “And us so happy.” The Color Purple ends with happiness and community, a happiness and community that challenges the “white and Christian” system that Celie and her family challenge.

Ashley Hope Pérez, writing about the challenges to her 2015 book Out of Darkness, drives home what bans and challenges of books such as The Color Purple say to students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and others. Pérez writes, “As libraries become battlegrounds, teens notice which books, and which identities, are under attack. Those who share identities with targeted authors or characters receive a powerful message of exclusion: These books don’t belong, and neither do you.” This is the same message that Celie gets at the start of The Color Purple when her stepfather and others call her ugly and say that she is inferior to everyone else. What message does it send to students or anyone to say, “You don’t exist.”

What does it do to someone if the only image they see reflected back at them in litertaure doesn’t look like them? This is what Pecola experiences in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye when all she sees is white actresses and equates whiteness with beauty. Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye to connect with individuals who may feel like Pecola, as if their phenotype doesn’t measure up to society’s beauty standards. What if Morrison’s or Walker’s novels didn’t exist? What if novels depicting the experiences of Black characters or LGBTQ characters indigineous characters or Arab charcaters or . . . didn’t exist? Where would these individuals see themselves? What message would that send, especially to children at such a formative stage in their lives?

Along with this, what does reading a book like The Color Purple do for white readers? Olivia Cole details how she came to Walker’s novel. She read it because she saw her name in it. She saw Celie’s daughter Olivia, and Cole thought, “I’m in this book.” It wasn’t her phenotype that connected her with Walker’s novel; it was her name. However, reading the book, along with others, forced Cole to look at the reflection that novel shone back at her. It caused her to examine herself. It caused her to work at removing the roots from the soil.

Books and art are important, in so many ways. When we move to ban or challenge any art, we move to erase the existence of others just because we fear what their stories say about ourselves. When we approach art openly, allowing it to speak to us, we become like Cole or others who take the stories in and learn from them, creating within us a desire for a better, all inclusive world.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.