In the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett he writes about the danger of books, because books are magical and some books are so magical they can cause great harm if read by the wrong person. In the Discworld books are actually magical but in the real world they are that type of magical but they are still dangerous to the wrong sorts of people.
People with narrow or closed minds are no good for books. They don’t understand books and as those types of people do with everything they don’t understand they begin to hate it. I have beside me the Toni Morrison book that a member of our school board wishes to ban. Tonight I am going to venture between those pages and see what it so scary. What lies within this book that makes it so unsuitable for places of learning.
I know what this book, The Bluest Eye, is about. It is about a young black girl in America living through a traumatic childhood that involves rape at the hands of her father, and this young black girl believes everything would be better if she had blue eyes. She wants to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple.
Now do we think it is the few words school board member, Victoria Manning, quoted on her Facebook page describing the rape or is it the fact that this is an allegory for a rape of a different kind. A rape of a culture and of a people. Of people stolen from their homes, brought to an unfamiliar land, forced to work in the fields and be taken as mistresses by wealthy plantation owners, people that were freed and once given freedom society worked tirelessly to put them back in servitude. Is it one scene of sex the school board member is worried about or is it the message?
If you look at the Facebook page of Victoria Manning you can see very clearly that she doesn’t care about children. She has no place on the Virginia Beach school board and is nothing but a bully and a conspiracy theorist. She basks in her ignorance and calls it light. She reminds me of Bev from Midnight Mass and we should stand up to all these bullies and hypocrites and tell them they are not a good person.
David Huzzard Writes 