Back in April, US Defense Secretary Pete “Signal” Hegseth ordered 381 books removed from the US Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library. These included works read by young people—Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give—and scholarship on books for young people, such as Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence and my Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books.
