The powerful censorship of a parent wielding a five-letter word: Paul Keane – cleveland.com

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vermont -- Toni Morrisons novel Beloved is in trouble in Virginia.

It contains scenes of sexual violence and it also contains images of slavery in America. Its a hot potato. A big term like critical race theory is being thrown around by parents and politicians.

The candidate who won the Virginia governors race supports a parent who wants a law passed that parents must be notified in advance if their kids are assigned a book like Beloved that contains explicit sexual scenes. The law in question would have required parents to be offered a tamer novel for their kids to read if they objected to one with explicit scenes or racial realities.

The other gubernatorial candidate, the one who lost, says parents shouldnt tell teachers what to teach. Period.

This is a rerun of my life as an English teacher in a Vermont high school from 1988 to 2012.

But it wasnt a Morrison novel that got me into trouble.

It was The Color Purple by Pulitzer-Prize winner Alice Walker, another distinguished African American writer.

It was the very first page which landed me in the principals office explaining my choice of books.

A mother had complained to my principal about a vulgar word a character in The Color Purple uses for a womans most private body part.

And that word isnt buried on page 200. Its on Page 1 of the novel. The vulgar term is used by a 14-year-old uneducated Black girl writing a Dear God letter because her father who had raped her had ordered: You better not never tell nobody but God. Itd kill your mommy.

The vulgar word the mother was objecting to her teenage daughter having to read in my 11th-grade Advanced English class was the same vulgar word which 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump would use in a notorious Access Hollywood taped conversation with Billy Bush.

That word nearly wrecked Trumps campaign weeks before that 2016 election. It had also threatened to wreck my fledgling teaching career in 1990.

The principal wanted to know why I was using that novel and if I could defend the vulgarity. I explained that the novel is written in vernacular and is true to the realities of southern uneducated people in the early 1900s.

Further, it builds toward an important scene about female genital mutilation, a brutal practice by males in other cultures designed to control women by reducing the pleasure they experience in sex.

I was earnest and the principal said he would support me if I wanted to continue teaching it.

I thought for a long moment.

Paul Keane, who attended graduate school at Kent State University, is a retired English teacher in Vermont

Did I want the problem, as a white male, of venturing to defend a literary work involving womens private body parts, even a literary work written by a Pulitzer Prize winner?

No.

I told the principal I would drop The Color Purple from my reading list rather than battle a students mother.

I had caved .

These words from an Ohio judge should have spoken to my Color Purple timidity as a new teacher in 1990 -- as they should speak to the fear among school boards and politicians in 2021.

This is what U.S. District Judge William K. Thomas of the Northern District of Ohio wrote in 1971, in ordering that the report of a Portage County grand jury be expunged and physically destroyed after the 1970 Kent State University massacre:

The Report is dulling classroom discussion and is upsetting the teaching atmosphere. This effect was described by other faculty witnesses. When thought is controlled, or appears to be controlled, when pedagogues and pupils shrink from free inquiry at a state university because of a report of a resident Grand Jury, then academic freedom of expression is impermissibly impaired. This will curb conditions essential to fulfillment of the universitys learning purposes ....

I never taught The Color Purple again. Although I didnt know Judge Thomas eloquent words at the time, to this day, I suspect that I impaired that academic freedom of expression in my Vermont teaching career -- all because I was afraid of a mother armed with a five-letter word.

Paul Keane, who attended graduate school at Kent State University, is a retired Vermont English teacher.

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The powerful censorship of a parent wielding a five-letter word: Paul Keane - cleveland.com