School Board Bans Novel, Ellison's Classic "Invisible Man"

Parents Forum
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<p>I admit, I skipped ahead to that scene. So I have it totally out of context in the book. My current take on it–which may be wrong–is that the woman Sybil (presumably an actual character, and not herself a fantasy) presented herself as a nymphomaniac, who wanted to be forced into a sexual act. I think both Sybil and the protagonist were intoxicated. Sybil passed out. I don’t believe the protagonist raped Sybil afterwards (he may not have been able to), though he did write on her stomach with lipstick. In a sense, Sybil was indeed “raped by Santa Claus” (as the protagonist wrote on her body), because within the construct of the book, she got what she wanted without experiencing the actuality of what she claimed to want.</p>

<p>From my adult perspective, I can see this as an instance of grim humor, even, in a way. I do not think that 16- or 17-year-olds have the judgment nor the experience to react sensibly to this scene, in general. The existence of <em>some</em> 16- or 17-year-olds who are mature enough to deal with it does not change my point of view.</p>

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<p>If I had a dollar for every “I’m curious” that takes us farther afield- sheesh.</p>

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<p>lookingforward, #162: I actually think that #146 is pretty directly related to the thread topic, in multiple ways. First, people are suggesting that nothing is off bounds to be assigned reading. Books are clearly a form of the press. The DKE boys weren’t actually doing anything, just chanting. That’s clearly a form of speech, and both are covered by the First Amendment. </p>

<p>Second, the issue of whether the analysis is different when the government is the actor (via the public school teacher) or when the actor is a group of fraternity boys is directly relevant to the thread topic.</p>

<p>Third, Yale screens its admitted students fairly carefully, given the low admissions rate. The DKE boys had been admitted to Yale–every single one of them. So if Yale boys, who are at least a year older than the students in the lit class, think that their chanting was okay, why would posters argue that 16- or 17-year-olds are plenty mature for The Invisible Man?</p>

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<p>QM, I have to say that I don’t think your question is really relevant to this topic at all. It might be relevant if you wanted to know whether we thought it would be appropriate to teach high school students about this incident in a public affairs class (my answer: yes).</p>

<p>We’re discussing a situation in which Invisible Man is being taught as part of a curriculum, so it is up to the teacher to make sure that the class is led through it properly. I have no doubt that there are some teachers who fail to do this well, just as there are some who fail at lots of things. But that’s not a reason to dumb down the curriculum for everybody.</p>

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<p>Did anyone have a chance to read the teaching guide I posted a few days ago from the OK teacher who includes Invisible Man in her curriculum? You can see how thoughtfully she approaches the content.</p>

<p><a href=“http://mseffie.com/AP/Invisible%20Man.pdf[/url]”>http://mseffie.com/AP/Invisible%20Man.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I am using the slightly modified scenario to address three issues that are directly related to this topic, Hunt:

  1. How does one apply freedom of speech and of the press in a high school context? I am in favor of both.
  2. Are there limits on the power of the government to enforce exposure to particular content? I would hope that there are. I do not see a public high-school teacher as solely a free speech actor when teaching. A public high school teacher is employed by the government, and students are required to be in the school (if the family cannot home school, nor afford private school).
  3. On what basis does one conclude that 16- or 17-year-olds are sufficiently mature to deal with themes that were reserved for university students in past years?</p>

<p>I suggested a particular scenario to make these questions concrete. However, I am perfectly happy for them to be discussed in the abstract. I think they go to the heart of some of the issues on this thread.</p>

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<p>I do appreciate the link to the curricular material, sally305, but think it makes the most sense for me to look at it after I have finished the book.</p>

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<p>QM, two points:
1)You do not want the book in the classroom, where there will be analysis and discussion of the book overall and of individual themes/scenes, but are ok with it being in the library where there will be NO guidance of these impressionable youth who will be reading the same book. Can you explain why one is ok with you and one is not? Wouldn’t open discussion be BETTER?</p>

<p>2)You’ve focused solely on the trauma the sex scenes will potentially cause females and sensitive males who are underage. What about the main focus of the book, the issues faced by blacks in the 1950’s? Should I and other parents of black students call for the book to be removed because of the trauma THEY might face? How about To Kill a Mockingbird? An innocent black man is tried for rape and is found guilty? Don’t you think there is trauma there for a student like my daughter, or even more so, young black MALES? Or take To Be a Slave, which includes actual stories from former slaves, including rape, murder, whipping, etc. Should all blacks be protected from THAT book?</p>

<p>My point is that unless we are assigning books where all is sweetness and light, there are usually conflicts, inequities and troublesome issues. That’s what much good literature involves. When and where does one draw the line-which potentially trauma-causing books do we ban and remove from the classroom? Which groups or teens do we protect? And how do we decide which ones?</p>

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<p>In terms of the trauma argument, it’s a slippery slope. Should we stop teaching about cancer in biology classes because some kids may have parents who have died of the disease?</p>

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<p>Freedom of speech?<br>
I guess that covers us on an anon forum.</p>

<p>I think your original point was valid. Tough as I may seem, I mentioned that much in lit disturbed me. Still does. Sure, I bring my own sensitivities. But, sure, I was from the liberal tradition that says this exposure is ultimately part of acknowledging what should be tackled and, if possible, changed. HS is a perfect time, a more captive audience, forming opinions, hearing the call to action (we hope.) A time when good teachers can guide reactions and parents should be able to augment. Ideally.</p>

<p>But, despite what kids are exposed to in ordinary life- suicide, deaths, drug use, alcohol, sex, pregnancy and disease, incest, rape, bullying, cutting, eating disorders, and etc- some do not have the faculties yet to process. They need a very careful hand guiding them, whether it happens to someone they know or in a book they read alone. These writings are not all “great lit”- and for many of those that are, it’s because of the opportunity to think and evolve. Or, it can be just a game of pong, the little emotional ball bouncing from side to side in one’s head.</p>

<p>I don’t see how the reasons for the Civil War or some juvenile, unfiltered behavior at Yale and now freedom of speech quite fit into the subject of reactions to the imagery raised in some lit.</p>

<p>I agree that it makes sense to you. But it also dilutes your original point. Sorry. This is what I would say at our proverbial dinner together.</p>

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<p>I’m sorry if I wasn’t being clear, I meant that how was the teacher supposed to know that QMP would have such an extreme reaction to that particular part of the book? That is why I brought up an example where I was reading two books and one scene caused me to be upset and the other did not, but I had no way of knowing which one would until I read it.</p>

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<p>The theme of the book is racism. Are you suggesting that racism should not be discussed until college?</p>

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<p>QuantMech, I am really curious why you think these are “themes that were reserved for university students in past years”? As I said, my mother taught The Invisible Man to high school students in the 1970s. My kids were taught it in high school in the 2000s. In fact, unless you were taking a specialized African-American lit course, I doubt you would read The Invisible Man in college except in a freshman lets-make-sure-you-graduated-from-high-school course. These are among the themes that intellectually ambitious, college-bound high school students are expected to deal with.</p>

<p>I read the Sybil scene last night, as you requested. Honestly, I can’t tell why your daughter reacted so strongly to it; I think that’s probably an idiosyncratic reaction. It’s a really unpleasant scene, deliberately so, but it’s not explicit at all. (In fact, because of the way the scene is “shot” and edited, you can’t tell whether the couple even had sex at the end or not. They are embracing, but slipping in and out of consciousness, and then it’s tomorrow morning.) Both characters involved are unlikable and morally compromised. The woman comes across as bored, stupid, drunk, condescending and un-self-consciously racist. The man is manipulative, contemptuous, rude, and willing to play along with his own degradation.</p>

<p>When the man writes “You have been raped by Santa Claus” on the woman’s belly in lipstick, it is an attempt to humiliate her, in revenge for her casting him in a racist fantasy, and something of a way to rape someone who insists on consenting to sex as rape. It’s absurd, and it has nothing to do with Santa Claus, except that Santa Claus is an unlikely rapist (and the opposite of her Big Black Buck fantasy). Then he washes it off.</p>

<p>The scene is certainly evidence of Ellison’s misogyny, but his misanthropy is not far behind. It may be upsetting for a 16-year-old to think of people having sex in such a crass, tawdry, manipulative way, but I’m not sorry if they get the message that can happen from literature, not their own lives. It is upsetting that the woman has a rape fantasy, and insists that the man pretend to rape her. But this was hardly a novel thought for the time, pre-Brownmiller, pre-Kate Millet, when it was something of a cliche to say that women secretly wanted to be violated (and when in many contexts rape was the only acceptable excuse for extramarital sex, and especially for extramarital sex between a white woman and a black man). We have changed the meaning of rape considerably in the past 60 years, made it profoundly un-sexy. But so does The Invisible Man – there’s nothing sexy about this scene at all. What’s wrong and upsetting about the scene is that there’s no element of love, respect, tenderness, or even really desire in the potential sexual encounter. There’s nothing personal at all to either. On both sides, it’s about power-tripping, plain and simple.</p>

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<p>JHS, your analysis and informed comments are so helpful in this thread. I will take the entire Santa Claus scene a step farther: at the time this book was written, in the centuries before that, and continuing in some places even now, there was/is a sick and twisted relationship involving sex between blacks and whites for many people.</p>

<p>Female slaves were often subject to rape by their owners, owners’ friends or owners’ male children. There was no way out, no protection. But a black male slave who had sex, even consensually, with a white owner could be killed. Invisible Man was written a couple of years BEFORE Emmett Till-a black teenager who was killed for paying attention to a white woman. The Santa Claus scene, to me, is an indictment of the way some whites viewed blacks-grist for a fantasy but not as real people. I don’t doubt the anger behind Ellison’s portrayal of these characters. It also wouldn’t surprise me if something similar had happened to him, or someone he knew, in real life. </p>

<p>THAT was the discussion I would have with a high school class a year or two from the age of majority, if I were an LA teacher.</p>

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<p>Re lookingforward, #170: I agree that the reasons for the Civil War do not fit very well with the topic. I didn’t bring this issue up, ucbalumnus did, on the heels of some suggestions that people who object to The Invisible Man are actually racist, and just covering their racism. Posters who want to know what I think about racism should look at my posts on the thread about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. I come out well on the “Implicit Bias” tests with regard to race. Also, I thought that ucbalumnus was not distinguishing sufficiently between causes of events, so I replied to that. Again, I agree that this was off-topic.</p>

<p>But I think that the issues that I mentioned in #166 are directly relevant to this thread. (I used #146 to provide a concrete example.) The DKE issue also raises the question: just exactly how mature do you think 16 and 17 year old boys are? That is relevant to the types of books that are assigned reading.</p>

<p>My viewpoint on this is unchanged: The book should be in the school library, and it should not be censored. In a public school, students should not be required to read the book, with the only alternative being to withdraw from the class (or maybe even from the school, as sally305 suggested). The issue of whether a book should be required reading or not is not identical to the issue of whether it should be in the library. But the first of those issues doesn’t seem so far off topic to me that it shouldn’t be allowed on the thread. </p>

<p>If the book is going to be assigned reading, my preference would be for the class to have several small discussion groups, of 6 to 8 students who read the same book. That way, a student would have a true option of books to read to fulfill a requirement, and the discussions might be a bit more thoughtful, too.</p>

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<p>QM - I thought QMP was male because I thought I remembered you having a HS age son. I was probably confusing you with another poster. Let’s not try to draw inferences from an honest mistake.</p>

<p>Of course I don’t think someone has to have been raped to find a rape scene disturbing. Everyone should find a rape scene disturbing. There is a difference between finding something in a novel disturbing and having what seem to be almost post-traumatic responses to it. I maintain that your daughter’s reaction to Invisible Man was not an emotionally healthy reaction, and that has nothing to do with the propriety of assigning the book.</p>

<p>The Stephen Gould piece is lovely. It has nothing to do with what should and shouldn’t be taught in a high school. Would you show that article to a history teacher as an argument against focusing too much on wars? </p>

<p>I can think of some pretty unambiguously positive novels on high school reading lists. Anything by Jane Austen. Silas Marner. Tom Sawyer, although that is usually neglected in favor of the superior and far more ambivalent Huck Finn. But the truth is, novels generally revolve around central, human problems that often don’t lend themselves to easy solutions, if we’re being honest. That doesn’t mean they always end in tragedy and nihilism, and I don’t think that any reading list should include only works like that. There are plenty of novels that strike a middle ground, including some novels I think are essentially joyful in spite of tragedies that may happen along the way (Their Eyes Were Watching God, for instance) and novels that are deeply disturbing but end hopefully, and perhaps even happily(Beloved). I wouldn’t have someone read Invisible Man AND Tess of the D’Urbervilles AND Heart of Darkness AND The Sound and the Fury AND Native Son in a single semester, unless it were a highly reading intensive course that leavened those works with a lot of somewhat less despairing fare. But there is no rule that everything you read has to be essentially life-affirming, which is, as I’ve said, also somewhat subjective. The fact that you cite King Lear, which I find almost too painful to read, as a hopeful antidote to depressing works, makes my point. </p>

<p>I’m really struggling to think of a four year high school curriculum that would

  1. contain works of sufficient literary merit
  2. expose students to a range of attitudes, values, and experiences
  3. include texts from a variety of periods</p>

<p>AND
4. Satisfy every single student and parent’s subjective viewpoint of what is or is not too disturbing/offensive/depressing/salacious for a high school class.</p>

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<p>Q, I don’t think you need to assure us you are indeed sensitive to life’s injustices. Nor that you want your kid(s) to be. I don’t think we need to dig into your views on racism a la Gates. No more than we need to dig into any other poster’s on this thread. It’s pretty clear our personal racism isn’t what’s being examined here. </p>

<p>I don’t think QMP’s reaction was emotionally unhealthy. I think it reflected how stunned she was- and perhaps, how she needed someone to guide her through. At this point, the question (to me) isn’t how she reacted then, but how she feels it altered her perspective and yielded a message today?</p>

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<h1>146: I pick - d) a cause for disciplinary action.</h1>

<p>Because I think it is harassment. And the campus is a student’s workplace. I think reasonable people do have a reason to be concerned when the DKEs walk through campus chanting that. I could elaborate. I won’t.</p>

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<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/harassment.cfm]Harassment[/url”>http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/harassment.cfm]Harassment[/url</a>]</p>

<p>Probably there was a thread on the DKE episode and Yale parents and alums already hashed this all out. I can believe the free speechers “won” the debate. I am not going to ever agree.
…</p>

<p>The idea some books are too mature for certain age groups really bothers me. My first chapter book was To Kill a Mockingbird and my second was 1984. I wanted to read what my parents and their friends were reading. Thank goodness no one told me I wasn’t allowed. I certainly didn’t read them the same way the grownups were reading them. I tried to be quiet enough not to get sent out of the room when the grownups got together and started talking about books. Sometimes I wonder if I am that much better a reader today, but that is beside the point. I got something out of them and I felt empowered. However, I was picking the books. No one was assigning them to me.</p>

<h1>172 -another great post from JHS-</h1>

<p>imho -In a perfect world, passages from Sexual Politics would be read and discussed before any highschoolers read “classics” with rape scenes.</p>

<p>I am now starting Invisible Man </p>

<p>QM: I am curious to know how you handled that classroom situation with QMP if you are willing to share at some point.</p>

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<p>Oh yes, to reading Sexual Politics before the classics with rape scenes, as alh suggests! I did not read this until grad school, but found it very enlightening then. The Invisible Man was completed in 1951, before the feminist movement had begun in earnest. I just looked up the date of publication of The Feminist Mystique, and was surprised to find that it was not published until 1963. I would have placed it before that. </p>

<p>I read 1984 at about age 12. It has had a life-long impact on me. Can you tell from my viewpoint here? Yet I think that I was too young for it then.</p>

<p>With regard to alh’s question about how I handled the classroom situation: Sympathetically in personal discussions with QMP, but poorly otherwise, I am afraid. I have never said anything about it (out loud, outside our family), except to a librarian whose son was in the class a few years ahead. It turned out that he loved the book. Oh, well. Frankly, I think QMP is still disgruntled about my complete inaction. </p>

<p>apprenticeprof, I would enthusiastically agree to your suggestion that the curriculum of despair should be leavened with other works. Locally, it was not–except (in my view) for The Color Purple, which was read before school started, in any event.</p>

<p>lookingforward, thank you for the first paragraph of post #176. I reacted as I did because there seemed to be innuendo that the person in Randolph County who objected to The Invisible Man was cloaking racism with objections to other content in the book–and perhaps that this was more broadly true of those who objected to having the book as a high school requirement. I cannot speak to the motives of the woman in Randolph County, but I am not necessarily suspicious of her. Nor do I think that anyone else who finds the book too emotionally difficult for some high schoolers has something wrong with them. It is an opinion, based on experience. It is clear that it is not shared.</p>

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<p>C’mon, apprenticeprof, Christmas came about 10 days after the Santa scene in The Invisible Man was discussed in class. I’m not going to agree that a reaction that lasted 10 days is emotionally unhealthy–especially in the circumstances, and especially with a book whose proponents hope that it will have a life-long impact. Aside from that, I didn’t mean that she was still crying about it for 10 days. But she was still angry about the class discussion for 10 days.</p>

<p>Some people are more tender-hearted than others. I am totally torn up about the situation at the mall in Kenya. QMP’s much beloved Latin teacher (now retired) was there teaching, with his wife, last February.</p>

<p>I subscribe to the Vulcan idea of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” I think that the human race as a whole benefits from having some very tender-hearted people. It also benefits from having some very tough-minded people, who are not emotionally affected by much, or who can shake it off quickly. I don’t think the world would be better if everyone were more like me.</p>

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<p>I don’t agree with protecting students from depictions of the negative situations of life. However, I do think that books with suicide should not be chosen for high school or earlier grades. “Romeo and Juliet” is the exception because I don’t feel people react to it as if it is real life as they would if it was set in the last couple centuries and if the characters spoke in modern English. I think suicide is the one thing where normally reasonable kids might be prone to copy destructive behavior.</p>