The fear and loathing of history motivated the banning of nearly 400 books at the U.S. Naval Academy, according to a panel of scholars whose works were included in the purge.
“I think very clearly that my book was taken off because people hate the truth and people hate history more,” said Anthea Butler, a religion and African American studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.
The 2021 book made the list of titles ordered removed from the academy library by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, according to recent reports by The New York Times and Baptist News Global.
The lineup of targeted books included influential and award-winning volumes on gender, race and sexuality such as Maya Angelou’s 1970 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Janet Jacob’s 2010 Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory.
Books not eliminated included Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 novel about immigrants usurping developed nations, and The Bell Curve, which claims white people are genetically more intelligent than Black people.
“The Department of the Navy’s purge of 381 books picked sides in the racism debate, and those that examine and criticize historical and current racism against Black Americans lost,” The Times reported.
The American Academy of Religion, a scholarly society focused on the study of religion, hosted a webinar April 15 featuring Butler and other authors who saw their writings on religion, race and gender banned by the Pentagon.
The organization also said it will stand firmly against the ongoing surge in censorship and other restrictions — including the revocation or freezing of government grants — that threaten academic freedom: “The AAR unequivocally denounces the banning of books, the withdrawal of research funding and the suppression of scholarly publication. These moves not only silence individual scholars but undermine the collective pursuit of knowledge that is foundational to a democratic society.”
“Racism is a feature and not a bug of American evangelicalism.”
The white evangelical drive to avoid and deny racial history is one of the primary motivators behind this and other bans, Butler said.
“Racism is a feature and not a bug of American evangelicalism,” she said. “But evangelicals have always wanted to tell a nice, happy history about themselves. They wanted to tell the history that they were against slavery, that they helped missionary work, that they were for lots of other things.”
But the reality is the Southern Baptist Convention was founded to protect slavery and white evangelicals lynched African Americans, actively opposed the Civil Rights Movement and voted for Donald Trump.
Censorship is a byproduct of being uncomfortable with the past, she said. “And when you hate history and when you don’t want to tell the truth about history, especially the history of racism in this country, what you have is a problem.”
Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute, said his book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, strikes a nerve in some by recounting his experience growing up a white Southern Baptist in Mississippi.
“I begin the book by saying the Christian denomination in which I was raised was founded on the principle that enslaving others based on the color of their skin was compatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he explained. “That’s the opening salvo of my book.”
Jones said he was in part inspired by author and civil rights activist James Baldwin’s scathing critique of white Americans after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long,” Baldwin wrote for The New York Times in 1968.
“My book,” Jones continued, “is mostly about me as a straight white guy from Mississippi who grew up Southern Baptist trying to take that indictment seriously. What it does is try to tell the truth about our history as unflinchingly as I can, and I think that in a sense is what really makes it ‘dangerous.’”
Jones added the Naval Academy book ban marked the first such action on the collegiate level ever in the U.S. “So this is a bright, clear line that’s being crossed and it’s important to say it’s not an American value.”
Bryan Massingale, professor of applied Christian ethics at Fordham University, said his book Racial Justice and the Catholic Church was banned because it calls out the workings of white supremacy.
“I tell the truth that racial subordination systems or racial subordination don’t just happen, they happen because of human agency, human decisions and human power,” he said. “We’ve got a system in this country of subordination of women and persons of color created by white elite men and kept going and preserved by those who are in alliance with white, elite, so-called Christian men.”
Massingale said he also argues that diversity in creation is no accident because God intended human beings to be diverse — an unwelcome message for an administration erasing women and Black people from official histories in the name of banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“When you’re trying to eradicate the Tuskegee Airmen and their accomplishments, that’s not anti-DEI. What you are basically trying to do is rewrite history so only certain memories and certain people count, and that is not the will of God.”
Another fact about the ban is its targets were found through simple word searches and certainly not from reading the books, said Michael Eric Dyson, professor of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University.
“I’ve got two books on (the list). But they ain’t read them because what they would understand is that all of us are self-critical, too. We ain’t just cheerleading ‘our side.’ We’re engaged in serious analysis of what’s happening in the world.”
Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, a series of letters Dyson wrote to the martyrs of racial injustice, was one of the rejected texts.
“Why are they mad at that? They’re mad because those are martyrs murdered by the insistence of white brothers and sisters that live in what Gore Vidal called the ‘United States of Amnesia.’ And they want to stay there. Our books are not passports into the ‘United States of Amnesia.’ They insist that we join the kingdom of memory,” Dyson said.
Dyson’s bestselling Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, which deals with the social and cultural pressures that have shaped issues of race in America, also was removed.
“I called white folk ‘beloved’ in the book. I’m a nice guy. I’m saying nice things but hard stuff, as all of our books do, insisting and demanding that white brothers and sisters come to grips with what has hurt them,” the author explained.
The nation’s shifting demography also stokes the fear that’s resulting in book bans, said Jim Wallis, director of the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice and author of America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, which was banned from the academy.
“They want to prevent our changing demography from changing our democracy. That’s their strategy. And so, the truth is our souls are at stake, our faith is at stake and of course our democracy is at stake.”
Related articles:
Hegseth bans books by Jones, Butler, Wallis, Angelou and Kendi
Reports of school library book bans were a ‘hoax,’ Trump appointees say
For the love of literature: How book bans are whitewashing America | Analysis by Laura Ellis