As I was traveling for the past week, I had a chance to check another book off of my reading list, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue. The book has won the following accolades: New York Times and Indie Bestseller, Amazon Best Book of the Year, CNN Summer Read Pick, recommended read for Teen Vogue and Buzzfeed, Best Book of 2020 for the New York Library, the Chicago Public Library, and Kirkus Reviews; list pick for ALA’s Rainbow List, Publisher’s Weekly’s Anti-Racist List, and for the 2021 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List.
Below is a brief interview from the author’s January 2022 chat with PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs. As Johnson discusses in the clip, his book has been banned in a lot of communities due to content that some view as inappropriate for young adult readers. However, as he also notes, the need for stories written for our most marginalized students is needed more than ever. The importance of students reading the personal stories of individuals they can identify with is critical.
I also want to note that this book was important for me, a white, heterosexual male to read. Johnson’s close bond with his Nanny made me think about my close connection with my maternal grandmother. It reminded me of the importance of encouraging access to stories of individuals and groups that help us see the humanity we share and allow us to break down the walls of ignorance and fear built through othering.
Here are a few of the excerpts that I will continue to reflect upon from the book:
Introduction - Black. Queer. Here.
“I learned that kids who saw me as different didn’t have an issue until society taught them to see my differences as a threat. Those differences, like being effeminate and sassy, were constantly under attack my entire childhood from kids who didn’t even know why I needed to be shamed for those differences. It wasn’t them shaming me as much as it was those raising them who taught them to shame others with those qualities. Most kids aren’t inherently mean. Their parents, however, can make them mean.”
Chapter 1 - Smile
“As an adult, I have gone through the unlearning to understand that my community’s treatment of Black queer children is in fact a by-product of a system of assimilation to whiteness and respectability that forces Black people to fit one mold in society, one where being a man means you must be straight and masculine.”
Chapter 5 - Honest Abe Lied To Me
“Again, it was easy to pay homage back then to white historical figures because we learned so much about them through the lens that they were concerned about us all. The interesting thing about studying history is how much it starts to change based on the school setting and who is teaching it. And it’s not always about how those teachers view history, but how they view you. And your place in history.”
“But I’ve come to learn that symbolism is a threat to actual change - it’s a chance for those in power to say, Look how far you’ve come rather than admitting, Look how long we’ve stopped you from getting here.”
“Why didn’t (my teacher) see that people, white people, had made a choice to enslave another race? There were abolitionists who were able to see it was wrong, and Quakers who were able to see it was wrong, so why couldn’t all white people see it was wrong?”
Afterword - All Boys Aren’t Blue
“But the most valuable thing I hope this book will teach others, as it has taught me, is that there isn’t always a solution. That sometimes some things just end the way they end. That some processes are always going to be an ongoing thing.”
“We don’t have to be so easily accepting of the norms we were forced to follow. We get to try them out and it they don’t work, create something new.”