I was surprised on Friday 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 #46 on the list of 381 books that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered purged from the academic library at the US Naval Academy, as reported by The New York Times. You can see the whole list here. It’s heartbreaking and frightening that the Oval Office and the Department of Defense have now 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.
Here’s just a quick sample. The Naval Academy’s banned book list includes Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (which spent two years in the early 1970s on the New York Times Best Seller list and was nominated for a National Book Award) and Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory, Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust.
The book ban also takes aim at key texts at the intersection of religion and racial justice—many of which are likely on your shelves—that students at the US Naval Academy will no longer be able to access in the library or find on their classroom syllabi:
- Prof. Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.
- Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America.
- Eddie Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul.
- Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
- Bryan Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.
- Rosemary Radford Ruether, America, Amerikkka: Elect Nation and Imperial Violence.
- Jim Wallis, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America.
To understand just how chilling this book ban is, you have to understand the place that the Naval Academy holds in the American higher education landscape. As a selective four-year college, it’s the highest-ranked among the three US military academies. According to US News & World Report, the Naval Academy is ranked #4 in the National Liberal Arts Colleges category, just behind Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore. It ranks higher, for example, than well-known prestigious liberal arts colleges such as Bowdoin, Pomona, Wellesley, and Carleton. Its alumni include the likes of President Jimmy Carter and Senator John McCain.
Here is its mission statement:
To develop Midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty in order to graduate leaders who… have potential for future development in mind and character to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.
As to what constitutes character, the first plank in the Naval Academy’s Honor Concept 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 that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have implemented at the US 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 foster. 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 that 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 model courage and integrity.
This defilement of a respected academic institution by those 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.
This article was originally published on Jones’s #WhiteTooLong Substack. Read more here.
