Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” used as race bait in Virginia’s governor’s race

As Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin made his case for governor of Virginia, he sought to energize his conservative base with a television ad featuring a mother who sought to have the book “Beloved” banned from classrooms in suburban Washington. 

The acclaimed 1987 novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is about an escaped slave who kills her two-year-old daughter to spare her from the evils of slavery. “Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. It was adapted as a 1988 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey.

The novel was dangled as race bait in the final days of the tight race for Virginia governor.

Youngkin, a wealthy former private equity executive, released an online advertisement that features a mother who pushed in 2013 to have Morrison’s “Beloved” banned from her son’s English curriculum eight years ago, citing the book’s graphic scenes. When that failed, she started an effort that eventually became a bill passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly, but that was rejected by former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat now running to win back his old job.

“It gave parents a say — the option to choose an alternative for my children,” the Northern Virginia mother, Laura Murphy, says in the ad. “But then Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed it twice. He doesn’t think parents should have a say. He said that. He shut us out.”

The ad did not disclose that the mother and her husband are Republican activists, that their son Blake was a high school senior taking advanced placement English when he read the passages that supposedly gave him nightmares or that he later spent a summer as a clerk in the White House under former President Donald Trump and now works as a lawyer for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

McAuliffe’s campaign and fellow Democrats accused Youngkin of trying to “silence” Black authors.

That’s partially true. But the ad is also part of long history of American politicians using race to garner votes and obtain power.

The Youngkin ad is a throwback to the line of thinking that led to book banning, a coded insult to one of America’s most celebrated Black authors and using race to win votes.

Another example of using race to win votes occurred four years ago in Virginia's governor’s race, the Republican nominee, Ed Gillespie, finished his campaign with a series of pledges to protect the state’s Confederate monuments.

The Youngkin ad should be seen in the context of months of Republican leaders in Virginia and nationwide, stoking fears about the way race is taught in the schools.

Since 2020, conservatives have falsely claimed that schools in Virginia and across the nation are teaching “critical race theory,” a body of legal scholarship that is not actually part of K-12 classroom instruction.

The effectiveness of Youngkin’s ads will become clear when polls close on Tuesday. 

Unfortunately, the Washington Post reports that: “The tactic seems to be working: polls show that Youngkin has gained on McAuliffe, and the race is a dead heat.”

But there is already a clear winner of the controversy: As of last week, Morrison’s 34-year-old novel was one of the top 50 best-selling books on Amazon.

Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @IrvRandolph and at the RandolphReport@substack.com