(The College Board has since said it would again revise its plan for the new AP course.) who view those topics as crucial to the subject of Africana studies. The change sparked anger among many educators across the U.S. Ron DeSantis that the proposed AP curriculum violated a state law that regulates how race is taught in schools. That month, the College Board had released a revised Advanced Placement African American studies curriculum that was scrubbed of required units on mass incarceration, the debate over reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement, following claims from Florida Gov.

And on one particular morning, Rooks recalled, she and Guterl were trading concerned notes about a growing movement in many states to censor stories about the long history of systemic racism in the U.S. Rooks said both scholars tend to start their days early, often texting and tweeting back and forth at 4 or 5 a.m. “What if we stood in support of the teachers who are being fired for trying to teach these kinds of works in these states - because we can?” “We kept saying, ‘What did this book ever do to people?’” said Rooks, who is chair of the department.

The idea for the reading came to Noliwe Rooks and Matthew Guterl, both professors in Brown’s Department of Africana Studies, in the wee hours one February morning. “Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty… A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes,” reads one of the book’s most well-known passages. “The Bluest Eye” has been banned by multiple school districts across the country, as book bans and censorship have escalated in the 2022-23 school year. Inside the bright agora of Stephen Robert Hall, Brown faculty members, students, alumni and administrators read passages from the book, which follows a Black girl in Ohio who longs to have lighter skin and blue eyes because she equates whiteness with beauty.

Scholars and leaders from Brown University took turns reading Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” to an audience of campus and local community members on Tuesday, May 2, as a show of support for teachers resisting book bans in classrooms and libraries across a growing number of U.S.

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