Why do book clubs always skip the controversial chapters?

I've been in the same club in Portland for 3 years now. Every single time we hit a chapter with something ugly, like racism or abuse, someone says "let's focus on the writing style instead." Last month we read a novel where the main character did something truly awful, and the whole room just went quiet. One lady literally said "I don't think we need to dwell on that." But that IS the book we all agreed to read. So we ended up talking about the cover art for 20 minutes. Has anyone else noticed this pattern? How do you get a group to actually wrestle with the hard parts without making everyone mad?

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