And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.” Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. “After the Black Lives Matter movement, after the 1619 Project, after the election of Barack Obama, any major moment in history where you see progress of people of color-Black people in particular-backlash will follow… Morrison books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. “ any advance by Black people, you will see some stirrings around banning a Toni Morrison book,” says Williams. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society and dean of Howard University’s graduate school, adds that efforts to ban Morrison’s books are not only about their text, but also about Morrison herself, the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Read more: Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88ĭana A. And that is actually what people have trouble with.”Ī 2016 TIME analysis of college syllabi found that, at the time, Morrison was the third-most assigned female author in college classes.

“Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. That is a violent legacy,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, of Morrison’s body of work. “What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. Beloved, for example, is inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856 to spare her from slavery. Scholars say one of the reasons Morrison’s books in particular are controversial is because they address, unabashedly, nearly all of the above, centering on dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable for some people to talk about.

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