Sulwe
by Lupita Nyong'o
The darkest star learns to shine.
For you if
your kid has ever wished they looked more like someone else
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Sulwe has skin the color of midnight. She is darker than everyone in her family, darker than anyone at her school, and she has spent years wishing she were lighter. She doesn't understand why her darker skin is something to be ashamed of — she just knows that it is, because the world around her keeps telling her so. Then comes the dream: a journey through the night sky, a fable about light and darkness that flips everything she thought she knew about beauty. Lupita Nyong'o wrote this because she lived it — the wish, the shame, the slow work of coming back to yourself. Illustrated by Vashti Harrison in deep, gorgeous color, Sulwe is the kind of book you put in a small hand and then have to sit down yourself.
Banned & challenged
Find out what they were so afraid of.
Get a copy and decide for yourself.
Central York School District in Pennsylvania pulled Sulwe alongside hundreds of other materials featuring Black and brown voices in 2021, under pressure from a parent group that described diverse books as "divisive." Duval County, Florida removed it from classroom libraries in 2022. The stated concern is never named clearly — "age-inappropriateness" is the usual fig leaf — because the actual threat is transparent: a picture book that tells a dark-skinned Black girl she is beautiful, in full color, on a shelf in a public school. That's what's dangerous to the people doing the banning. Not the art. Not the "explicit content." The child on the page, finally seeing herself.
See every banned & challenged book on our shelves →Where This Book Lives
Lupita Nyong'o grew up between Kenya and Mexico, and built a Hollywood career while navigating an industry that spent decades telling Black women with dark skin that they were less-than. She wrote this book from that place. Vashti Harrison's illustrations — deep purples, blues, and golds — don't just depict the story; they make the argument. Banned in Pennsylvania and Florida for the threat a Black girl loving herself apparently poses to some school districts, Sulwe is exactly where the catalog needs it.
Related Viewing
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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe(2023)
dir. Aitch Alberto
Same theme: Identity and Belonging
One summer, secrets neither boy knew he had.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican-American teenage loners strike up a friendship that cracks open everything one of them has spent years keeping carefully closed off — including who he is. Adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its tenderness rather than its edge — a bilingual, bicultural, queer coming-of-age story that doesn't need trauma to justify its own gentleness. Pedagogical in showing how friendship can crack open a kid who's spent years protecting himself by staying closed.
Where to watch: Streaming on Disney+, HuluLetterboxd ↗
Bamboozled(2000)
dir. Spike Lee
Same theme: Internalized Racism
The minstrel show, on prime time.
Pierre Delacroix, a Black TV writer, pitches a modern minstrel show as a deliberate insult to get fired, and the network loves it. It becomes a hit, and the satire spins out of his control. It was shot on digital video and is one of Lee's most uncomfortable films.
Why it’s here: The film turns the lens on who profits from caricature and who agrees to wear it. What's punk is that Lee refuses to make it comfortable: the audience laughing is the target. What's pedagogical is media literacy in its harshest form: how a joke becomes a product, and how the person making it stops being able to say no. It contains harsh imagery by design. Pairs with Sorry to Bother You and Network.
Where to watch: Rent only: Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango At Home (~$3.99)Letterboxd ↗
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For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
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