Oscar winner Julianne Moore’s Freckleface Strawberry, a picture book about a redhead who learns to live with her freckles, is among books being removed from schools for military families for review.
Just weeks after the Trump Administration claimed book bans were a “hoax”, the same administration is purging books from schools run by the Department of Defense Educational Activity, serving 67,000 children of U.S. service members around the world.
In addition to Freckleface Strawberry, books flagged for “compliance review” include Vice President JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, according to reporting by Task and Purpose, and a packet of materials about Black History Month for sixth-graders, according to the Washington Post.
Moore expressed “great shock” about the removal of her book, first reported by The Guardian, saying, “It is a book I wrote for my children and for other kids to remind them that we all struggle, but are united by our humanity and our community.”
The removed titles and book chapters contain content targeted for bans across the country, said Kasey Meehan, program director of Freedom to Read at PEN America. ”The removal of these titles is yet another indicator of the new Administration’s flippant and autocratic approach to K-12 education.”
The restrictions were put in place as school officials review whether the materials comply with executive orders from President Donald Trump restricting discussion of transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion. An additional executive order bars the Department of Defense and its schools from promoting “un-American” ideas, which it says includes diversity, equity, and inclusion, “gender ideology,” and anything that would suggest “that America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.”
The department also banned cultural observances, prompting schools to cancel Black History Month events and remove bulletin boards referencing Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks. Schools also disbanded clubs, and said transgender students could no longer play sports or use the bathroom of their choice.
Books flagged by Department of Defense schools include:
- Freckleface Strawberry, by Julianne Moore, illustrated by LeUyen Pham
- Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family, a book about transgender actor and activist Nicole Maines, written by Amy Ellis Nutt.
- No Truth Without Ruth, a picture book biography of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Nancy Zhang
- The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by Vice President JD Vance
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
- An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, by Glory Edim
- War: How Conflict Shaped Us, by Margaret MacMillan
- Instructional materials for sixth graders for Black History Month
- A chapter on “sexuality and gender” used in Advanced Placement psychology for high schoolers
- An elementary school publication titled “How Does Immigration Affect the US?”
- A biography of Albert Cashier, a transgender man who served in the Civil War
- A reading of “A Nation of Immigrants” in a social studies lesson for fourth-graders
