In the latest trigger-warning battle, the usual outrage teams found their roles totally reversed.
At least one Virginia student complained that the disturbing, critically acclaimed book Beloved by Toni Morrison (pictured above) gave him nightmares. So at the behest of the high schooler’s mother, Republican state lawmakers sprang into action. They sought legislation that would require schools to send parents what essentially amounts to a trigger warning before assigning students any sexually explicit book.
In a letter, Republican state senator Dick Black described Beloved as “vile” and “profoundly filthy”—comments that the normally trigger-happy left rushed to condemn.
His comments sent the literary left into a conniption. It’s worth noting, though, that Toni Morrison’s brilliant fiction has proven, ahem, “problematic” for the PC crowd, too.
Trigger Warning Bookshelf, an online database that “believe[s] that having trigger warnings are vital for many people, and that they should be able to look them up easily,” assigns no fewer than five categories of possible triggers for Beloved. (The website also claims it is not pro-censorship.)
Under pressure from college (not high school) students, Columbia University replaced Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Morrison’s Song of Solomon—“but Morrison’s more famous novel Beloved was not chosen, probably because it’s full of vivid scenes of rape and racism that could be “problematic” for some students,” Daily Beast columnist Michael C. Moynihan wrote last summer.
It’s hard to predict what, exactly, will traumatize America’s fragile students. The president of Daemen College recently wrote about a student who dropped out of class to avoid reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye—not because of the weighty racial and sexual content, but because the word “snot” made her “extremely uncomfortable,” even though the book was accurately describing a sick child with a clogged nose.
At the same time, anything less than enthusiastic support for Toni Morrison can also ignite campus ire. When a Columbia professor asked for syllabus book recommendations last year, one student complained about re-reading this high-school curriculum favorite.
“The student’s remark regarding Toni Morrison was not merely insensitive, but also revealing of larger ideological divides,” three members of the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board wrote last year in the Columbia Spectator.
Good luck to educators navigating that minefield of hypersensitive, tyrannical twenty-somethings.
Left-wing pundits haven’t done much better in figuring out what to do when one of their favorite books offends somebody.
Take Jezebel’s Tracy Moore, who spent some time thinking about Toni Morrison, trigger warnings, censorship, and campus culture.
Her conclusion is a Mobius loop of contradictions: “Terrible shit doesn’t feel good,” but “ironically, by aiming to avoid painful reminders of trauma in art, you might also be skipping the chance for healing it offers– but then again, trigger warnings are “actually part of an inevitable movement toward finally considering perspectives we once shamed into silence.”
Fortunately, earlier this month, reason won out over absurdity as Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed the Beloved bill.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum and the Steamboat Institute.