Erin Gruwell, a first-year teacher, was handed a class of "unteachable" minority students at Woodrow Wilson High. They came from troubled homes that often left little time or energy to focus on education. She was shocked, too, by a racist cartoon that circulated and by finding out that her students had never heard of the Holocaust.

In response to her students' needs, Gruwell devised a reading list relatable to their experiences. Central to to it were books that observed systemic racism in action in war zones. Two key texts on this theme are Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, which recounts what it is like to live as Jew hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and Zlata's Diary by Zlata Filipović, who has been called the Anne Frank of Sarajevo. Filipović was about Frank's age when she kept a diary of the war horrors she witnessed during the racially motivated Bosnian civil war, of which ethnic cleansing was a feature.

Similar books include Todd Strasser's The Wave, which was about an experiment in imposing a quasi-Nazi system on a classroom, and Elie Wiesel's Night, a fictionalized account, from the point of view of a teenaged boy, of Auschwitz. Durango Street by Frank Bonham and Romeo and Juliet also became relevant texts in their focus on teen violence and gang (or feuding family) warfare.

All of these books helped the students reflect and shed light on their own experiences and to feel empowered to build a better future.