"Is it right to force children to read a work that upsets them because the work includes language that attacks who they are?"

I'm not sure that captures things exactly -- that statement needs, I think, not to be colorblind or genderblind or blind to all the other possibilities for privilege vs oppression. Otherwise you get all kinds of false symmetry.

On the general question, I think this is also a place for nonuniversal curriculums. As with amethystfirefly, the environment where I read the book was one where "racism is really bad" was already a pretty controversial statement. I know incrementalism is sometimes worse than the ills it claims to fight, and yet. (I had a really eloquent part here about moses syndrome, which is the tendency for most people who break out of old systems to fully enter into the new system they're trying to enable, but it probably doesn't go here.)