What to Read During Banned Books Week

by Maia Kobabe

“Gender Queer” is a beautifully illustrated memoir by Maia Kobabe. It’s about Kobabe’s journey from eir earliest memories of grappling with eir gender and sexuality to eventually identifying as non-binary and asexual.

With thoughtfulness and humor, Kobabe explores what it’s like to navigate a world that often sees gender as strictly male or female. While gender and sexuality are different, “Gender Queer” shows how they can be connected. Kobabe doesn’t shy away from this complexity; Ey talks about it openly and carefully.

Reading eir story should make us all think about how we understand gender and sexuality in our own lives and encourages us to create a more inclusive world where transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people are accepted without having to explain themselves or justify their existence.

Camara Hudson
Education Counsel, The NYCLU

By Toni Morrison

“The Bluest Eye” is a powerful story by Toni Morrison that follows Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl, and her longing for blue eyes, a symbol she believes is synonymous with whiteness. Pecola grapples with colorism, internalized racism, societal beauty standards, religion, gender, femininity, and the traumas of sexual violence.

Tugging at all my emotions at once, Morrison allowed me to deeply empathize with characters in a way I never imagined I could and caused me to deeply reflect on my own memories of being a younger Black girl. Just as importantly, Morrison forced me to sit with the discomforting forms of internalized racism and colorism that manifest in my own communities. “The Bluest Eye” provides a way for young Black girls to reflect on their own girlhood, and to unlearn white internalized beauty standards.

Sara Ismail
Teen Activist Project (TAP) Student Leader, The NYCLU

by Harper Lee

Relayed through the heart, mind, and eyes of a child, the story of “To Kill a Mockingbird” explores systemic issues as deeply human ones. Through a series of events unfolding in their small Alabama town, six-year-old Scout Finch and her brother Jem are made aware of issues previously unknown to them – racism, discrimination, and the marginalization of people on the fringes of accepted society. The novel forces readers to question who has a vested interest in controlling the stories we hear and tell.

Having first read this book as an impressionable high school student, I learned how to begin untangling and addressing injustice in my worlds. I figured out how to stand on my values and navigate the discomfort that tags along, and to be a neighbor that my community can count on.

Amanda Waggoner
Administrative Assistant, The NYCLU

By Art Spiegelman

In the final years of his father Vladek’s life, cartoonist Art Spiegelman sat down to record his memories of the Holocaust. The harrowing result chronicles not only the family’s decimation at the hands of the Nazis but also how the trauma informs their lives and relationships decades later.

Spiegelman famously portrays Jewish people as mice and Germans as cats, subtly satirizing the racial ideologies that led to the “Final Solution,” but he refuses to reduce the characters to caricature, painting vivid portraits of the people Vladek met both in and out of the camps. “Maus” pulls no punches in detailing the atrocities inflicted on victims.

I still vividly remember reading the book for the first time as a 7th Grader as part of a unit on the Holocaust. Re-reading the book as an adult was just as moving, as many of the stories resonate with accounts I have heard from survivors in my husband’s family. As a parent to a young child, Vladek’s memories of his firstborn son, who did not survive, were particularly poignant.

Emma Hulse
Skadden Fellow, The NYCLU

By John Green

“Looking for Alaska” follows a young boy named Miles Halter as he comes of age at a boarding school in Alabama. As the story unfolds, you get a glimpse into the lives of young kids who are on their own and trying to find themselves. You can easily identify with the characters as they pull pranks, fall in love, and experience loss and grief.

Reading this book as an adult takes you back to when you tried new things with the older crew. You learn as you go and stumble along your path.

Cassandra Minerd
Education Strategist, The NYCLU