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My source for this incident is the introduction to:
Alice Walker: Banned
Ed. Patricia Holt -1996
ISBN 1-879960-47-8
Dewey # PS 3573 A425 A6 1996
This slim volume has as its primary purpose the object of offering some of Ms. Walker's works that have been challenged; two short stories and extracts from The Color Purple. Not that the excerpts themselves have necessarily given offense. The Color Purple has been excoriated and challenged for several issues. The two short stories in this book are Roselily and Am I Blue?. The introduction, by Patricia Holt, then the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, is a fairly superficial examination of the challenge and the rationales and mind sets of the censorship advocates involved in this incident. The volume also has appendices containing material from both the CLAS controvery and The Color Purple controversy.
Roselily is a stream of consciousness story that explores the thoughts of a woman during her wedding ceremony. The character is a mother of four, essentially abandonded by her last lover who took the child she bore for him back home to his wife and family. The other three she is still raising. Each series of thoughts runs through her mind by degrees while the preacher is reciting the familiar refrain from Dearly, beloved to forever hold his peace; they are chaotic and disconnected as compared with each of the other thought-series, very much in the frame of stream of consciousness. Each, however, is whole within itself. As much as a free associative style of thinking can be.
The so-called irreligious elements might stem from Roselily feeling and dwelling on her antipathy for the preacher and the expectation that she will keep her place as a good and dutiful wife. As well as from the uncertainty she feels at her own place in the grand scheme of things. During these ruminations she calls into question the full gamut of the angst-ridden adolescent insecurities that attach themselves to our psyches like leeches and are dragged along with us for the rest of our days.
Am I Blue? centers around the thoughts of a woman as she re-encounters the special regard children have for domesticated animals and that is usually lost in perpetuity to adulthood. If one wished to slot this story into a genre then I would proclaim it to be a tragedy. The tragedic elements are approached by writing "off the subject" as we say in the business. Ms. Walker does not address them directly, but rather approaches them obliquely. Through the course of the story, the character, who is never named, comes to realize the callousness inherent in how domesticated animals are treated by humanity at large [1].
As events progress, she comes to equate these general attitudes and exploitations more and more with the kind of slavery Ms. Walker's own ancestors went through [2]. At the end, sitting down with a guest to a dinner of steak, the narrator realizes that she is very much part and parcel of this system of exploitation and spits out a bite of meat in bitterness and self-loathing.
Both of these short stories were due to be on the 1994 California statewide exam for Grade 10 students. Both were pulled shortly before the exam was administered. This incident happened under a cloud of suspicious circumstances, and, I am happy to say, thoroughly rebounded to the detriment of the censorship advocates.
As near as I can tell according to Ms. Holt's reporting of the facts in the introduction to Alice Walker: Banned, the statewide exams were supposed to remain confidential until they were adminstered to all students on the same day and at the same starting time. However, in this case confidentiality was broached by the Traditional Values Coalition, led by Reverend Lou Sheldon. Based in Southern California, this group complained loud and long about Ms. Walker's stories being on the exam, going so far as to "leak" the short story Roselily to a newspaper, which printed excerpts of it. According to a newsletter article by the ALA and quoted by Ms. Holt, this triggered a series of protest letters from other Christian conservatives. So the Board of Education pulled the stories.
However, they screwed up big time. They didn't pull the stories because of the breach of confidentiality. They pulled Roselily because it was "anti-religious", and Am I Blue? because it was "anti-meat-eating".
Furthermore, this incident was propelled into the realm of the tragicomedic by the fact that Alice Walker was due to receive an award from the governor of California. These awards were due to be given to people considered to be "state treasures", and was sponsored by the California Arts Council. Selected for 1994 along with Ms. Walker were Stephen Spielberg, Hal Holbrook, and David Hockney. When this came out -- when Ms. Walker commented publicly on the dichotomy -- the office of the governor apparently released an announcement to the effect that the decision of the Board did not amount to censorship and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the awards by the governor.
So Maxine Hong Kingston waded angrily into the fray. Ms. Kingston is a past recipient of the governor's award for state treasures herself. She proclaimed that those issues could not be disconnected. She also withdrew her permission for the board to use any of her works on any state exams. In a letter to the Board of Education, she reportedly wrote, "By banning a selection because certain words offend a minority of the population the California Board of Education fails to recognize its real value: the pursuit of truth."
Ms. Kingston was joined in her support of Alice Walker by the ACLU, the NAACP, the California Association of Teachers of English, the Anti-Defamation League, the California Writing Project, the San Fransisco Foundation, People for the American Way, and a number of other institutions and authors.
Peter Wilson, then Governnor of California, wrote to Ms. Walker, explaining, "I oppose censorship of any kind. [...] I have not endorsed the removal from tests of any of your writings." He allegedly blamed the incident on a staff member who had the made the decision without his knowledge or consent and while he was absent[3]. He also apparently stated that the decision was based on misinformation[4].
In fact, this statement seems to have been a piece of misinformation in its own light. Ms. Walker's supporters replied to this letter -- in which the Governor asked Ms. Walker to reconsider her decision to pull out of the awards program -- by saying that the staff member had discussed the case with the governor after the Board's decision had been made public, and that the staff member had made the statement on the governor's behalf. The plot point in this Keystone Kops caper at this point, however, was that Governor Wilson, despite his protestations and condemnations of censorship, apparently did nothing to correct the situation.
Ms. Holt reports that Mr. Wilson sent a letter to Board of Education President Marion McDowell and to Superintendant of Schools William Dawson, in which he wrote in part, "we must oppose censorship of any kind. It contradicts my personal beliefs and betrays the principals upon which our free society is built. Any hint of biased selection of materials or censorship in the development of the test is intolerable." Pretty words, Ms. Holt allows, but Mr. Wilson did not tell them to set things to rights about the incident underway.
Perhaps it was because of that, that Ms. Walker remained unconvinced about accepting the award. She wrote back to Governor Wilson, "I sincerely appreciate [the governor's] request that I reconsider acceptance. A few weeks ago, I would have been honored. However, I love California and respect its children too much to accept becoming a 'state treasure' in a state whose educators consider my work a menace to the 10th grade."
According to Ms. Holt, the phrase menace to the 10th grade belies Alice Walker's role in life, but that it seems to echo the concerns of the California Board of Education about the affect her short stories would have on young Californians.
At any rate, Mr. McDowell released a statement that seemed to belie the state of affairs. In it, he denied that the Board of Education's actions had been motivated by racial bias, censorship, or the lobbying of special interest groups. Despite the fact that the incident had been triggered by the Traditional Values Coalition and that other ultra-right wing religionists had jumped on the bandwagon; and which had also challenged Anne Dillard's An American Childhood as too violent because of the inclusion of a snowball fight.
So, what came of all this? An examination of the statewide tests indicated that they were in fact racially biased -- or, to be more specific: culturally biased. The exams were slanted so as to be advantageous to students who were from a privileged background: white, middle class. Nothing new there. The San Fransisco Chronicle had reported in 1985, nine years earlier, that black students consistently scored 100 points below white students on average on Standardized Aptitude Tests. It seems the tests included material and concepts more suitable to the exclusionary country club than to the ghetto. "Polo", "property taxes", and "regatta" were cited as for instance.
Because of this, the education system in California was reassessed and there was a move away from multiple choice examination. Students were encouraged to think about things instead of merely regurgitate facts and examinations had essay questions on them. This became the California Learning Assessment System, or CLAS. Students in grades four, eight, and ten are still required to take the statewide exams under this system, but the cultural/racial bias has been erased and the playing field is level.
So everybody is happy, right? Wrongo! According to Ms. Holt, the CLAS system of testing had come under rather heavy criticism as an invasion of student privacy and a violation of their religious beliefs and personal values. And can you just guess who is raising the hue and cry about that? . . . Reverend Lou Sheldon and his Traditional Values Coalition.
FOOTNOTES:
1: Compare Anne Sewell's Black Beauty with Am I Blue? for a similar treatment of human/beast-of-burden interactions.
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell
ISBN ?
Dewey # 823.8 S516B
2: Compare Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin with Am I Blue? for a similar treatment of owner/slave interactions. They are exactly parallel.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
ISBN N/A
Dewey # 813.4 S892U
3: Travelling, I assume; absent from the state capital.
4: Yeah, well, that goes without saying.
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