1 week Ago
No book can pose a threat to the mighty U.S. Navy.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration recently removed 381 books from the Naval Academy library because, apparently, midshipmen need to be protected from knowledge that race relations and the treatment of women and gay people have never been exactly shipshape in America. President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deny there’s anything racist, sexist or homophobic about their purge of books related to diversity, equity or inclusion from the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library. But the message they sent is undeniably one of discrimination — and a grave dishonor to a service academy that has made great strides in recent years in making sure the Navy welcomes and benefits from a full spectrum of human experiences and backgrounds.
The targeted books — some scholarly research, some biographical, some works of fiction — all deal with race, gender or same-gender relationships. None would be out of place in a university or community college library, and some — such as Maya Angelou’s widely acclaimed “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — are mainstays in high school English classes. But the Trump administration seems to think that the men and women following in the footsteps of the heroes of the Battle of Midway can’t handle Kate Normington’s “Gender and Medieval Drama” or Jane E.
Dabel’s “A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women.” Although their predecessors fought valiantly at the Battle of Hampton Roads, today’s students at the Naval Academy are also apparently no match for Philip Perlmutter “Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America.” The Trump administration did leave some intellectually challenging books on the shelf, however, including two copies of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.
” One hopes it’s not meant to be an instruction manual. The purge on DEI also did not snare “The Bell Curve,” a notorious piece of pseudoscience that argues that women and people of color are genetically inferior to white folks. A critique of the book was yanked, however, in an apparent abundance of caution.
One of Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s favorite works of fiction, a 1973 French novel called “The Camp of Saints,” is also still available to check out at the Nimitz Library. The book, which depicts immigrants destroying Western civilization, enjoys dog-eared popularity among white nationalists and was once touted by Miller in emails to Breitbart staffers. The U.
S. Navy will survive exposure to these books, too, of course. But the Trump administration’s decision to make these tomes available is, at best, curious.
Is the goal here truly to rid the military of supposedly divisive and mission-weakening DEI initiatives — a specious claim from the start — or is it to promote an ideology that grades Americans on a Bell Curve? There’s no sugarcoating it: Authoritarian regimes throughout history, on the right and the left, routinely conducted purges very similar to what the Hegseth-led Pentagon has done at the Nimitz Library. It’s all the more appalling given that the library’s namesake, Navy legend Chester Nimitz, embraced prejudiced beliefs not at all in line with DEI principles but did, crucially, have the good sense to recognize the power of a military that reflects the makeup of America. Sign up for Viewpoints, an opinion newsletter It was Nimitz who awarded the first Navy Cross to an African American, Dorie Miller, for heroism at Pearl Harbor.
Miller’s name was among African Americans whose stories were scrubbed from Pentagon websites this year but restored following a public outcry. The removed pages included those of Jackie Robinson, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and Ira Hayes, the Marine and Native American who helped raise the U.S.
flag at Iwo Jima. Despite protests from Naval Academy graduates and students — as well as many of the Americans they serve — Trump and Hegseth are showing no inclination they will reverse their book purge. These books should be returned at the earliest opportunity — namely, when a more intellectually honest president and secretary of defense are in power.
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