(RNS) — I was surprised the other night when I started getting messages that my book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” — which won a 2021 American Book Award — appeared as No. 46 on a list of 381 books that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered purged from the academic library at the U.S. Naval Academy, as reported by The New York Times.
You can read the whole list of books here that were banned last week because they included diversity, equity and inclusion subject matter. It is heartbreaking and frightening that the Oval Office and the Department of Defense have ordered outright book banning, but I am taking comfort from being in the company of such courageous, important authors.
The list of banned books reads like a who’s who of leading writers. It includes award-winning and best-selling books, many of which have established themselves as foundational works in their fields.
For example, the Naval Academy’s banned book list includes Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” which spent two years on the Times bestseller list in the early 1970s and was nominated for a National Book Award. It also includes “Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory,” Janet Jacobs’ examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust.
Some of the books removed from Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy. (Screen grab)
The book ban also takes aim at key texts at the intersection of religion and racial justice — like mine — that students at the Naval Academy will no longer be able to access in the library or find on their classroom syllabi:
-
“White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” by Anthea Butler
- “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” by Michael Eric Dyson
- “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,” by Eddie Glaude Jr.
- “Racial Justice and the Catholic Church,” by Bryan N. Massingale
- “America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence,” by Rosemary Radford Ruether
- “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America,” by Jim Wallis
To understand just how chilling this book ban is, you have to understand the place the Naval Academy holds in the American higher education landscape. As a selective four-year college, it is the highest-ranked among the three U.S. military academies. According to U.S. News & World Report, the Naval Academy is ranked No. 4 in the National Liberal Arts Colleges category, just behind Williams College, Amherst College and Swarthmore College. It ranks higher than many well-known prestigious liberal arts colleges. Its alumni include the likes of the late President Jimmy Carter and Sen. John McCain.
Its mission statement reads: “As the undergraduate college of our country’s naval service, the Naval Academy prepares young men and women to become professional officers of competence, character and compassion in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.”
As to what constitutes character, the first concept in the Naval Academy’s honor code reads: “Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right. They tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known. They do not lie.”
The book bans President Donald Trump and Hegseth have implemented at the Naval Academy are a direct assault on its own mission and a clear violation of its own honor code. Developing competence requires exposure to the best existing scholarship in the field; developing character requires living a life of principle and dedication to the truth; developing compassion requires being able to grasp the world from the perspective of another — something arts, literature and a critical humanities-based education fosters.
Most importantly, book bans prevent the Naval Academy from developing persons of integrity. Book bans are an aggressive, systemic form of lying, both about the past and the present.
Removing these books from the academic library — which almost certainly excludes them from course adoption — means any student attending the once-prestigious Naval Academy will receive a distorted education. Worst of all, it requires Naval Academy professors to lie to their students rather than modeling courage and integrity.
This defilement of a respected academic institution by those who are waging an outright assault on higher education is, disturbingly, the goal. Honor and integrity are inconvenient stumbling blocks on the road to absolute power. To create a new American authoritarianism, Trump and Hegseth must invert our most cherished values, maligning truth-telling as divisive ideology and censoring critical scholarship in the name of freedom of speech.
(Robert P. Jones is president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author, most recently, of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.” This article first appeared on his Substack newsletter. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)