In celebration of Banned Books Week, Politics & Prose Bookstore tips its cap to the books that offended, outraged, and generally poisoned the minds of the masses with wanton creative expression. Though our selections make great kindling, we assure you they’re much more enjoyable when read. Join us all week on the slide into moral turpitude with the best censored reading material the canon has to offer.
Alice Walker’s epistolary tale of sexism, racism and poverty in rural Georgia was challenged dozens of times since 1984 and removed or banned from at least five school libraries across the United States between 1984 and 2010. In 1984, the book was challenged in a high school honors class in Oakland, California due to the work’s “sexual and social explicitness” and its “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality.” Though it remains unclear what “social explicitness” actually means, these and other so-called “troubling ideas” certainly seem to warrant a healthy dose of censorship.
Some sentences worthy of censorship:
He act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he kilt it. I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello. I got breasts full of milk running down myself. He say Why don’t you look decent? Put on something. But what I’m sposed to put on? I don’t have nothing.