Opinion: Controversy over ‘Beloved’ is so much bigger than one book

Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. CNN — The latest salvo in the Republican Party’s culture war against teaching children about racial injustice has targeted Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s literary work on racial slavery, the American South and US history. Peniel Joseph Kelvin Ma/Tufts University The Virginia gubernatorial race between Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin’s reached a new low when the GOP candidate released an ad featuring a conservative activist, Laura Murphy, who campaigned against the teaching of Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Beloved,” on the grounds the story’s grueling depiction of racial violence gave her son – then a high school senior – nightmares. The GOP efforts to suppress our nation’s longstanding history of racial injustice has been, in dozens of states including Texas, successfully weaponized as an assault on so-called “critical race theory.” The view of history articulated in anti-CRT rhetoric – which has spread like wildfire in the conservative media ecosystem – echoes the “Lost Cause” mythology that reimagined the White supremacist violence after the Civil War as a courageous movement to preserve Southern honor and tradition. Morrison’s literary imagination worked to produce what she called a “critical geography” of the most terrifying parts of American history – in order to heal these wounds that continued to fester in the nation’s soul.