TCP Review

This is my final action project for my class called Forbidden Books. In this unit called “Diversity”, we learned about why certain books were banned for promoting different diverse communities, and how they were protested against. For this action project, I wrote an essay review on the movie “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, and I talked about why people were against it. My favorite part of making this action project was getting to watch the movie, since I never watched it, and I actually learned a lot more than I expected. The biggest problem I had while making this project that I would’ve changed was that I have never actually seen the movie before. The problem I had was that since I never saw the movie it made it harder for me to do my review because I had to keep going back and looking at certain parts. I eventually was able to collect enough information to finish my action project.

The Color Purple Cover (2012) Pintrest

The movie, “The Color Purple” is a controversial film and book made Steven Spielberg and Alice Walker. It takes place in the early 1900’s in the southern part of America. At this time, there is still racism and you were able to get married at much younger ages. The story talks about at the beginning that the main character (Celie) has had two children with her father, and that he sold one those children to other parents and gave the other away for free.

One of the reasons people who wanted the movie banned for was because it was filled with scenes of domestic violence. When the book came out, everyone couldn’t stand that Celie was always being beaten. For example, in one of the scenes in the movie Celie is brushing the hair of her husband's daughter and the daughter can’t stop screaming in pain. When her husband asked Celie if she would make his daughter stop screaming she told him she couldn't. When she said that she couldn’t, Her husband ended up hitting Celie for talking back. Scenes like these were just one of the reasons why people fought to get the book banned.

Another reason that people wanted to get the movie banned was because it had a disturbing amount of racism towards black people. This especially made the black community upset because some of the scenes in the book would seriously offend them. An example of one of those scenes is when a white woman asks a black woman to quit her job and work for her as a maid. When the black woman said “Hell no”, a white man walked towards her in order to intimidate the black woman. When he attacked her she punched him in self defense, but she was soon surrounded and she was forced to leave her kids while she was attacked and sent to jail. This scene shocked the community who watched the film and it even made some of the watchers mad enough to fight against it.

The final large reason “The Color Purple” community tried to get the movie banned, was because it referenced a lot of “mature content” like sex and cursing. In the movie basically every other scene is either talking about or having sex, and cursing. A good scene that portrays this argument is when Celie and her sister Nettie are talking about how their dad keeps trying to make more children with Celie while waiting to do the same to Nettie when she’s old enough. They keep making fun of it, but you could tell they were really sad to have to go through that. This was mostly disturbing for parents because they were afraid their children would read the book and talk to them about it.

I honestly don’t think the book or the movie should be banned because every reason that people tried to get it banned actually happened to people. I feel like this book is more of realistic version of history with all those factors that were mentioned. If we always banned books with content similar to “The Color Purple” then we wouldn’t have a real version of history or anything to work away from, like slavery, or racism.