I logged into social media this morning to find that Beloved by Toni Morrison was in the news.  It's being reported on in several outlets, but see for example, from CNN: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' becomes latest flashpoint in Virginia gubernatorial race

I read Beloved in 2017, and reviewed it on this blog.  So I can chime in with my 2 cents.

CNN says that the controversy all started when a mother campaigned to remove Beloved from her school because it gave her son nightmares.  And I can believe that.  To quote from my 2017 review: 

Before we started the book, Tom expressed the concern that this would just be another feel-bad novel about slavery.

But this book is so much more than this.  It's a ghost story, and Toni Morrison has succeeded at creating a very haunting atmosphere.

I'm reminded of the review that the AVclub gave to the movie: 12 Years a Slave:

If there was any doubt that this is a horror movie, Hans Zimmer’s score pounds and roars with dread—the appropriate soundtrack for the madness of history.

The idea of slavery as a horror story is probably a more accurate description of Beloved.

The story of the book is told mostly in flashback.  Right from the beginning of the book, we hear the names of the former slaves that the main characters (Sethe and Paul D) once knew, but their gruesome fates are only hinted at.

The mystery hooks the reader right in, and helps to add to the eerie atmosphere of the ghost story.

Gradually, the novel gives us more and more hints, until we finally have the full awful picture of what happened at Sweet Home.

According to The Daily Beast,  another problem was that the book was just too hard, and so the student stopped reading it.  And I can believe this second part as well.  To quote again from my 2017 review:  

I didn't like Toni Morrison's writing style.  It was too poetic for me, and I had to struggle to keep focused.
Granted, this is more reflective of me and my limitations as a reader than it is of the book.  If you're the kind of person who likes a lot of poetic description in your novels, then you'll love this book.
Getting frustrated with one of the more poetic passages, I wrote down "Ugh, typical" in the margins next to this paragraph:
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it--through Beloved.  Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it.  so she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her--and a heartbeat.  The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands--the unrested hands of busy women; dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, and how it was really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy's voice, her breath like burning wood.  The quick-change weather up in those hills--cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirl--a recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy's fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth.
If you like that, there's plenty more where that came from. But I found this almost unreadable.  (To be perfectly honest, if this hadn't been a book club book, I think I would have given up on it.  But because we were doing it for bookclub, I struggled through out of a sense of obligation.)

Other articles mention that the mother was also upset about depictions of sex and bestiality.  Which, honestly, I don't remember.  I remember some sex scenes in the book, but I don't remember them being particularly graphic.  Perhaps I'm just not remembering clearly, I don't know. 

I also don't remember the bestiality parts.  I googled it just now, and sure enough, there is a brief reference to bestiality in the book.  I just didn't remember it for whatever reason.  

(I think I'm finding as I get older that I no longer remember the details from books as clearly as I did when I was younger.)

So, those are my thoughts on the book.  I'll give my thoughts on the controversy below:

In my humble opinion, Beloved probably isn't the best book to have on the school curriculum.  Although granted this depends on what the curriculum objectives are.  I can think of 3 reasons for doing assigned reading in a literature class:

    (A) To develop a life-long love of reading by showing students how pleasurable reading can be

    (B) To increase cultural literacy by becoming familiar with the classics

    (C) To develop students ability to read a complicated text that is currently beyond their level.

In my opinion, Beloved does not do (A) very well.  It's a very difficult book to struggle through.  Some students might like it, but it's not going to be enjoyable for the majority of them.

And I think it's too recent to do (B)--the book was only just published in 1987, it's not old enough to be a classic.  

Arguably it could do (C) if it had a very good teacher who was guiding the students.  But let's face it, these kind of teachers are rare.  

So if I were on the schoolboard, I certainly wouldn't mandate that this book be in the curriculum.

I know that this book is popular in part because it portrays the African American experience, and I agree we need books on the curriculum that do narrate what the slavery experience was.  But there are many other books that would do that without being so challenging to read.

All that being said, these are decisions that should be made by educators, not politicians.  It should send chills down our spines when politicians are getting involved in this stuff.

And it should especially set off our alarm bells when they are campaigning on it.  I mean, it's one thing if they respond to public pressure once they're already in office.  But it's quite another thing when they are deliberately trying to create a controversy out of this by campaigning on the issue.

Without knowing anything else about Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, I already know all I need to know about him to decide that no civic minded American could possibly vote for him in good conscience.

It should also raise alarm bells that Glenn Youngkin has chosen this issue.  This is, according to the news articles, an issue that didn't have prominence before, and is a controversy that he largely created.  Are there no other problems in Virginia that he could focus his attention on?  Poverty? Homelessness? Healthcare?  Fixing the roads?  Climate change?

Whenever you see a politician trying to ignore the real problems in order to try to create a culture war, that's also an issue that they are ideologically bankrupt.

Laura Murphy - McAuliffe Shut Us Out (:60)

Final thought: Granted, this isn't just an issue with Republicans.  People on the left have been guilty of trying to get books out of schools as well--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain being the most famous example.  We shouldn't tolerate this stuff from the left, and we shouldn't tolerate it from the right.