Conversation:
George M. Johnson in conversation with Dr. Aisha Wilson-Carter
George M. Johnson is an award-winning Black nonbinary writer, author and executive producer located in the Los Angeles area. They are the author of The New York Times bestselling young adult memoir All Boys Aren't Blue, which was optioned for television by Gabrielle Union. As a former journalist, Johnson has written for major outlets, including Teen Vogue, Entertainment Tonight, NBC, and Buzzfeed. In 2019, they were awarded the Salute to Excellence Award by the National Association of Black Journalists. Johnson was listed on the Root 100 Most Influential African Americans yearly publication in 2020, the Out100 publication of influential and impactful LGBTQ people in 2021, and the TIME100 Next list of rising leaders in 2022. Their second memoir, We Are Not Broken, was released in September 2021 and was a secondary honoree of the Carter G. Woodson Book Award in 2022. We Are Not Broken also received an honor in the Young Adult Nonfiction category from the International Literacy Association in 2022. Johnson is a proud HBCU alum twice over and a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
In October 2023, Johnson spoke with students, read from their book, and was interviewed by Dr. Aisha Wilson-Carter, the Executive Director for Equity and Inclusion at Hofstra, to commemorate National Banned Books Week as part of the 20th annual Great Writers, Great Readings series. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space.
Aisha Wilson-Carter: Welcome! Could you start us off with an introduction to your story and the attempts to ban All Boys Aren’t Blue?
George M. Johnson: My story. Well, I guess I never expected to be here fighting against fascism and censorship in the United States. But I also should have always expected to be here just because of the history of this country and watching how we have dissolved into where we are today.
The pandemic shutdown happened March 17, 2020. My book came out on April 28, 2020, just four and a half weeks after we were all locked down. We did not know what the book was going to do because there were no bookstores open. There was nothing open. We were all going through this catastrophic event together, and the publishing industry wasn't sure how we were going to navigate it. Fortunately, because we all got stuck in the house, people decided to start reading again. Because of that, the book actually did really, really well throughout the summer. It made a lot of summer reading lists. It made People Magazine's list, Buzzfeed’s list of the top books during that year. And the book kind of started to pick up like its own little cult following. I went almost 17 months without any issues with the book. I always knew that the book was going to have some challenges; it was going to get banned. I just didn't think it was going to look like this.
Then, in September of 2021, somebody on Twitter said, ‘Hey, George, there's somebody running for school board in Kansas City. And they are—their whole platform for running is to get rid of your book from the Kansas City libraries.’ So I went on Facebook, I saw what this man had posted. It was a lot of vitriol. Anybody who knows me knows that I can be kind of funny and shady and witty. So, [I started a fight.] I thought that was the end of it.
But it turned out, at the time, a coalition of primarily white women was forming to basically destroy the education system in the country through the eradication of black titles, queer titles, and primarily titles that were not centered on white students. Within eight weeks of that first attempted challenge, my book had been removed from eight counties and eight different states. But a lot of people didn't know what was going on because they were doing it in very, very, very small counties, which had only local newspaper reporting.
I always set up Google Alerts on myself because my grandmother always said, if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. So always stay ready. I already knew what was going on; I was just keeping track of it. And once it got to eight, I was like, ‘Alright, now it's time for me to talk about it publicly.’ So I started talking about the book bans publicly.
Soon, I got my first ever criminal complaint for All Boys Aren't Blue. A woman took my book to a sheriff's office because she couldn't get her way with the school board and filed criminal charges against the book. I did not know you could file criminal charges against a book either. So it was a very interesting day.
Fortunately, it didn't move forward. But her attempt at doing that allowed seven other states to do the same thing and file criminal charges against my book, with Iowa finally being able to pass a law that makes it illegal to disseminate some of our books to minors if you are an educator with a fine of up to $2,500, as well as up to one year in jail. Throughout this, I have continued to be one of the most vocal people in fighting against the book bans. I've been one of the most vocal people in fighting against censorship. My favorite author is Toni Morrison. And because I get to live in a world where I had an ancestor like that, who already taught me everything I needed to know about this type of fight, I continue to do it vigorously because she left the groundwork for what was going to happen today. As I stand here, my book is still continuously being banned. It is the second-most banned book in the United States right now.
AWC: I just loved how you wrote about how the greatest tool you have in fighting the oppression of your blackness and queerness and anything else within your identity is to be fully educated on it. Knowledge is truly your sharpest weapon in a world. Aside from your new book coming out, how else would you suggest to students to find more knowledge on blackness and queerness?
GMJ: I want everyone to get knowledge on yourself. I think that's, like, the main thing that All Boys Aren’t Blue has done is make people who have never had to question themselves, question themselves. Question your own identity, question your history, question where you came from. […] That is why I'm writing a book on the Harlem Renaissance. Because the Harlem Renaissance was full of queer people. And yes, yes, thank you once again for proving that LGBTQ people run the culture. Yes, we create culture. We have always been a part of the culture. We were there on the slave fields. We were there during the Civil Rights Movement. […] That part got left out of the story.
Audience Question: In our Publishing Studies class, we read about We Need Diverse Books, and the article said that even though there has been in a huge increase in diversity in characters, especially in young adult, that diversity is usually still produced by white authors. What has been your experience in trying to make a name for yourself in a still primarily traditionally white publishing industry?
GMJ: It is not easy. I say it all the time. If I was white and queer with this story, I would have won a Pulitzer. I would have been on covers of magazines. I will be the face of the movement for real, but because I am black and queer with this story, it was absolutely not happening. There are stories that are like mine that never got challenged, […] that became movies that no one ever had an issue with. It wasn't until we started telling real narratives that all of a sudden people had issue with it. So, in this industry, it is hard.
There was a hashtag on Twitter called Publishing Paid Me, where the white authors basically tweeted what they were getting paid in advance for their first books and their second books versus what we were getting paid in advance for our books. It shook the industry because it really showcased exactly that—even when you have more diverse stories, or even when you have more authors, we're still not given the opportunities or the amount of money that we can survive off of to create more stories. If you're a debut author and they give you $800,000 for your first book, you could sit at home and write books all day. If I only get $50,000 for my first book, and it's broken up into three payments over two years, I'm going to also have to work another job. And that's pretty much the plight of the black author. Many of us have other jobs. This is my other job. I'm speaking here now and I will be in Maryland next week. […] What I decided to do was I wanted to carve out a space for myself that I wasn't really seeing too much in young adult, which is nonfiction. There aren't a lot of nonfiction young adult titles and I will be having my third one by next year. So it is carving out a space that people didn't know could exist or thrive. I think that's where we kind of as black folks or Latinx folks trying to come into the industry. We try to kind of shake it up.
I think Elizabeth Acevedo does a wonderful job of that with every book she writes, especially with the Poet X, because it's such a mixed media style and format. Certain folks can't recreate that because that's a certain type of growing up and a certain type of heritage and a certain type of magic and legacy and spirituality. You got to have to be able to write like that. Even my Harlem Renaissance book: I'm writing poetry, it's mixed media, it gets into spirituality, there's a certain thing that you can't just mimic. There's certain things [white authors] can't mimic; it's always going to be missing from the text. The words may be the same, but the spirit and the soul ain’t there. And so for us, that's what we have to lean on to make sure that we showcase why our books have to be there and the importance of the fact that no, you cannot just simply substitute me with a white gay and try and tell the same story. Thank you for that question. It's the first time someone ever asked that.
Audience question: What is your goal for the books? Your purpose?
GMJ: I feel like my purpose is, as somebody who's very tied to the ancestors and everything, I think I've come to slowly realize, like, that my purpose isn't necessarily just for the generation that's here that actually sees me [and] the work that I do. The book that I put out, the words that I put into the world, are for kids I'll never know and I'll never meet, 100 years from now, who have yet to read it. When we put certain things in the world, they keep us here, beyond our time and our physical bodies. […] So my books will be here when I'm gone. My story will be here when I'm gone. With We Are Not Broken, my second book, I put all of my grandmother's quotes in because I wanted her words to be here for somebody else, because she didn't get to tell them to everybody else. And I think that's realistically what my purpose is. It is like I put these things into the world knowing that it isn't just for the time capsule that I get to be here, but that it's for the future-future-future person who reads that book and then becomes President of the United States or then becomes the next great James Baldwin or the next me or the next whomever.
AWC: One final question. Today, with book banning, with legislation, with the hateful rhetoric, where's that safe space? How do we create that?
GMJ: There is no safe space for us. You know, just as black folk, there are really no safe spaces. But realistically, when you really sit at the intersection of multiple oppressions, there really is no safe space for us. I mean, we do the best we can to try and create our own safe spaces. Like when Senator Kennedy got up there and he put, like, the strongest To Kill a Mockingbird, Jim Crow, Foghorn Leghorn Southern Baptists accent he could find to read the text of my book...it was, it just was so like, like Forrest Gump! That wasn't even a Louisiana accent. I don't know where it came from, but he pulled it from the 1850s. And, you know, the clip goes viral. It's in every single newspaper across the country. It's on Fox News. MSNBC refuses to play it, but they're like, this is what happened today. But in the midst of that, there were so many comments from people who were either defending me or people who didn't know the book existed got the book, and then were like, oh my god, I'm so glad he did that because now I know this beautiful story exists.
I always like to say, I don't have a bad day. I just have bad moments and good days. For the most part, I just try to find those little moments of joy, and I let the little moments of joy try and outweigh everything else. I also think that black liberation resides in our imagination, because that's the one place they can't touch. So as long as I'm able to continue to create, I'm gonna always be good. Thank you.
————
Transcribed by Tal Heyman & Nell Stultz
