Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ Is A Slasher Film?
Glenn Youngkin’s Campaign Is Just Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ on Drugs
Glenn Youngkin, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, left me no choice. Few have stooped as low as he stooped recently in his politics.
Using a supposed white parent to trash the Nobel laureate writer, Toni Morrison, and all Black people, in his latest ad calling for banning Morrison’s book Beloved, Youngkin again steps deeper into the debate over American history and white supremacy.
And it is not new really — it is really just Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in a bad disguise.
“Southern strategy — The playbook Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater used to rally political support among white voters across the south by leveraging racism and white fear of people of color.”
Beloved is a book that exposes the evil of American slavery. Youngkin wants to bury that history by banning the book and others. To do that he is even willing to lie to the public and perpetuate that the problem here is Toni Morrison’s art and not America’s unwillingness to reckon with white supremacy and its foundational beliefs as a country.
There is little more than can be said but here is the ad, for the record:
Now first, the incident Youngkin is exploiting occurred about 10 years ago. To bring it up now and not tell the viewer is dishonest. And second, the so-called traumatized teenager, who was required to read Beloved in an AP English course, is now a lawyer, who was a senior in high school at the time.
Yet, if you think this is just politics, seek help. Educate yourself. Reform. The woman is claiming in the advertisement that Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, a book about the evils of chattel slavery in the U.S. caused her son to have nightmares. Considering Morrison is deceased, it is particularly low down to use her and her book as a racist prop.
But the ad is nonsense and Youngkin should be embarrassed for approving such a sick racist ad. But he is likely more embarrassed about the history he thinks should be suppressed so he ran the ad and is promoting a racial censorship policy. Youngkin has already made it known how he feels anyway about public education. He would stop efforts to correct America's historic racial past in education teaching.
If you want to criticize your opponent for his views on education, go ahead. But don’t lie to people and use Black history and literature to scare your voters into voting for you. Maybe the woman you used actually believes what she said.
And maybe her son, who, as I said, is a lawyer now, and is 27, and who works for the Republican National Committee, really had nightmares. But his trauma wasn’t because of Beloved; it is because his country is a nation that did horrible things to people and continues to try to suppress this history.
Beloved is a true story. An enslaved Black woman named Margaret Garner actually did slash her child’s throat to save the child from the horror of slavery. This is the story that is told in Beloved, the book Youngkin thinks should have been banned and should be banned in his ad.
But instead of focusing anymore on Youngkin and his racist campaign, here is Morrison giving her take on education and the Black experience from 1992 and American racism:
WEOC Editors Medium Staff Medium Momentum Blog Team
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