Women of color are taught from a young age to take up as little space as possible: to be soft, to be quiet, to be careful.
So when I learned that my book about young women of color owning their confidence and learning to code was banned last year, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Because at its core, the ban on my book isn’t about books at all. None of them are. Rather, book bans are about oppressing girls—especially girls of color, queer girls, and nonbinary people—by making us believe that our stories aren’t worth sharing, our aspirations aren’t worth pursuing, and our identities aren’t worth celebrating.
Today, on International Women’s Day, it’s more important than ever that we fight back.
Being a banned author is certainly a dubious honor, but hardly an uncommon one. Books like mine are being stripped from shelves across the country, with a particular focus on erasing stories centering Black and queer voices. From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America tracked over 2,500 book bans, novels pulled for uncovering systemic racism and honoring trans lives, casting light on teen activism and celebrating religious diversity. If there was a common thread uniting these titles, it was that each offered an underrepresented point of view—one that could empower someone who shared it to challenge a broken system, and rebuild it in their image.
In that sense, book bans are part of a larger, manufactured culture war to keep young people from understanding and uprooting harmful systems of oppression—all under the guise of, ironically, shielding them from harm in the first place.
To be clear: every student pays the price for this so-called “parental rights” battle—and indeed, girls are hardly the only group, or even the primary group, being targeted. But girls, and especially Black and brown girls, queer girls, and non-binary kids, are disproportionately affected by these bans—and they’re the ones whose futures will suffer for them.
When girls, and particularly girls of color, lack exposure to scientists and physicians and coders who look like them—including through books like mine—they’re less likely to pursue the kinds of high-earning careers that propel them towards economic independence.
When girls, whose gender is underrepresented at every level of government, aren’t granted a fuller picture of history, they’re less likely to become civically engaged—whether it’s voting for politicians who support their rights to body autonomy and equal protection under the law, or one day becoming those politicians themselves.
When girls, who represent 82 percent of victims of sexual assault under 18, don’t learn about sexual violence, whether it’s through a textbook or a poetry collection, they are less likely to recognize it in their own lives.
And when girls don’t see their identities—from their race and religion, to their gender and sexual orientation— depicted with honesty and nuance, they feel unimportant, invisible, and insecure for years to come.
Coupled with the rapid backslide of the body positivity movement, the toxicity of social media, and the prospect of coming of age with fewer rights than their grandmothers, and it’s no wonder American girls are in crisis. Last month, the CDC recently reported that 60 percent of female students experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness, with nearly a third of high school girls reporting that they seriously considered suicide—double that of their male counterparts.
