People Are Red Over The Color Purple

This morning while I was on the computer checking my email, I stumbled across an article listing 10 banned books that you might not expect. One of the books listed was The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The book focuses on an African American female living the the south during the 1930's, and tells mainly about her struggles as a lower class black citizen living in the south during that time. 


I thought that this tied in well with what we were discussing in American Studies this week.  We were discussing President Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech, and how he declares that "so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation." This got me questioning, why was the book The Color Purple banned? The article states that it was because of issues of race and abuse, but I believe that the problem can be traced deeper than that. Was the book banned because America is still racist today? Or perhaps it was banned because of feelings of guilt. Feelings that there are still disparities between the black and white population today, and the white population feels that they have to ban, or bury any evidence that these disparities still exist. Many would argue that there are no such disparities in the country today, however, I personally believe that this is not the case. When you look around, one can find that there are still dividing lines between African American and white people, in terms of education, social status etc. Why these dividing lines exist is hard to say, but I think that it brings up a good question: Why do disparities between African American and white people still exist today?