The
Blaze
Pedophilia,
incest and graphic
sex... excerpts from Common Core reading list
Mike Opelka
Aug. 22, 2013
Editor’s
note: The following story
contains graphic language. Discretion is advised.
Common
Core, the controversial set of
education standards being pushed by many state governors and education
leaders,
is coming under fire for its selection of a book that’s on the
suggested
reading list for 11th graders (i.e. 16- and 17-year-olds). The book — a
past
selection of Oprah’s Book Club — has graphic sex scenes and
descriptions that
are likely to make you blush.
The
work in question comes from
Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Listed on a Common Core
reading list
linked on the website, “The Bluest Eye” carries this description from
the
curriculum’s preferred bookseller: An Eleven-Year-Old African-American
Girl In
Ohio, In The Early 1940s, Prays For Her Eyes To Turn Blue So That She
Will Be
Beautiful.
That
description sounds tame and
appears to be a solid lesson about the problems of desiring beauty over
anything else. And if you read the Common Core website, here’s an
excerpt from
the 11th grade exemplar text:
One
winter Pauline discovered she
was pregnant. When she told Cholly, he surprised her by being pleased.
He began
to drink less and come home more often. They eased back into a
relationship
more like the early days of their marriage, when he asked if she were
tired or
wanted him to bring her something from the store. In this state of
ease,
Pauline stopped doing day work and returned to her own housekeeping.
But the
loneliness in those two rooms had not gone away. When the winter sun
hit the
peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs, when the smoked hocks were
boiling
in the pot, when all she could hear was the truck delivering furniture
downstairs, she thought about back home, about how she had been all
alone most
of the time then too, but that this lonesomeness was different. Then
she
stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to
the
movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she
succumbed
to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was
introduced
to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the
history
of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and
ended in
disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her
mind,
bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and
simple
caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the
goal of
the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw
the
most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison
the
beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
Keep
in mind, that is an excerpt,
selected by Common Core. And when they publish these online, they are
accompanied by this statement: (emphasis added)
When
excerpts appear, they serve
only as stand-ins for the full text. The Standards require that
students engage
with appropriately complex literary and informational works; such
complexity is
best found in whole texts rather than passages from such texts.
Again,
when you read the selected
passage, a couple of things stand out — Morrison’s powerful command of
the
written word cannot be denied and the story appears to teach that
over-the-top
devotion to physical beauty is “one of the most destructive ideas in
the
history of human thought.” But the snippet posted above is just the
excerpt
presented online for teachers and interested parents to peruse and
doesn’t
mention what else is between the pages.
What
else is in there? Simply: The
the entire book has numerous questionable sexual sections that may not
be
appropriate for minors.
Macey
France, a writer for the
online site Politichicks, actually combed the entire text of “The
Bluest Eye”
and catalogued some of the more offensive and questionable parts. And
they are
graphic:
Pages
84-85: “He must
enter her surreptitiously, lifting
the hem of her nightgown only to her navel. He must rest his weight on
his
elbows when they make love, to avoid hurting her breasts…When she
senses some
spasm about to grip him, she will make rapid movements with her hips,
press her
fingernails into his back, suck in her breath, and pretend she is
having an orgasm.
She might wonder again, for the six hundredth time, what it would be
like to
have that feeling while her husband’s penis is inside her.”
Pages
130-131: “Then he
will lean his head down and bite my
t** . . . I want him to put his hand between my legs, I want him to
open them
for me. . . I stretch my legs open, and he is on top of me…He would die
rather
than take his thing out of me. Of me. I take my fingers out of his and
put my
hands on his behind…”
Pages
148-149: “With a
violence born of total helplessness,
he pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear. ‘I said get
on wid
it. An’make it good, n*****, Come on c***. Faster. You ain’t doing
nothing for
her.’ He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he
hated her
so much.”
Pages
162-163: “A bolt of
desire ran down his genitals…and
softening the lips of his anus. . . . He wanted to f*** her—tenderly.
But the
tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he
could bear.
His soul seemed to slip down his guts and fly out into her, and the
gigantic
thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made. Removing
himself
from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his
genitals out of
the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted.”
Page
174: “He further
limited his interests to little
girls. They were usually manageable . . . His sexuality was anything
but lewd;
his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated
in his
mind with cleanliness.” And later, this same pedophile notes, “I work
only
through the Lord. He sometimes uses me to help people.”
Page
181: “The little
girls are the only things I’ll
miss. Do you know that when I touched their sturdy little t*** and bit
them—just a little—I felt I was being friendly?—If I’d been hurting
them, would
they have come back? . . . they’d eat ice cream with their legs open
while I
played with them. It was like a party.”
Those
six graphic excerpts cover
incest, rape and pedophilia. In her research on the book in question,
Macey
France also exposes some pretty shocking support for those topics, from
the
author herself:
In
fact, the author of the book,
Morrison, says that she wanted the reader to feel as though they are a
“co-conspirator” with the rapist. She took pains to make sure she never
portrayed the actions as wrong in order to show how everyone has their
own
problems. She even goes as far as to describe the pedophilia, rape and
incest
“friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender.” It’s no wonder that this book is
in the
top 10 list of most contested books in the country.
The
presence of the book on Common
Core’s list, combined with Morrison’s descriptions of incest, rape, and
pedophilia as “friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender” have sparked outrage
in some
communities. Parents in one Colorado school district are petitioning
for the
removal of “developmentally inappropriate and graphical content from
the
instructional reading list.” They are not asking for the book to be
banned or
even removed from the library, just taken off the suggested reading
list.
Ms.
France also cites a 2011 Harris
poll on the banning of books and limiting of certain types of books in
school
libraries. In that
poll, Harris showed:
83%
say children should be able to
get The Holy Bible
76%
support access to books that
discuss evolution from school libraries
62%
say books with explicit
language should not be available to children in school libraries.
With
an overwhelming majority of
parents supporting restricting – but not banning – young student’s
access to
books with explicit or questionable content, should Common Core pull
this book
from it’s list of exemplars? We invite you to participate in our Blaze
Poll and
comment below.
Read
Ms. France article at
PolitiChicks
Read
this article at The Blaze
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