Cultural Suicide

On the books that Trump hates

The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump's anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library.

The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, and so on.

I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different.

First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills's book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields's and Karen Fields's Racecraft is purged. (The irony of that is almost impossible to bear.) A book on the memorializing the Holocaust is purged. Reginald Horsman's amazing book on Josiah Nott is purged. Manning Marable's book is purged. Steve Estes's awesome I Am a Man is purged. Randall Kennedy's book is purged. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's book is purged. Linda Gordon's book is purged. Imani Perry's book is purged. Andrew Hacker's book is purged. Like I said, knowledge as we know it.

Second, this is also a purge of really conservative texts and writers. One book is a series of interviews with Arthur Jensen. Remember Jensen, of IQ is hereditable and related to race fame? Gone. Deirdre McCloskey—one of the most important economists and recoverers of the bourgeois virtues of Smithian economics—is gone. Carol Swain, a prominent Black conservative, is gone. Juan Williams's conservative critique of Black leaders is gone. For all the talk of cancel culture on the left, I can't think of a single leftist academic who would ever support the elimination of any of these authors or texts, some of which are extremely hateful, from a campus library.

Third, this is also a purge of texts that I had thought were so classic, so canonical, that no one outside a small school district in the middle of nowhere would dare purge them. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? Gone.

Fourth, this is also a purge of texts by authors I know personally. In addition to some of the authors above, there's Nikhil Singh, whom I went to grad school with and organized with: Gone. Eddie S. Glaude? Gone. Chris Lebron? Gone. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor? Gone. Jessica Blatt? Gone. Jonathan Holloway, one of the first people I met in graduate school (Raul A. Ramos, I think it was you who introduced us)? Gone. Mari Matsuda? Gone. Charles Lawrence? Gone.

Last, the last book I'd like to mention—Madeline Hsu's The Good Immigrants—is more unsettling to me. I've never read it. I went to graduate school with Hsu, but I didn't know her. The reason it's unsettling is that my daughter is taking American History AP this year. They're practicing for the exam, doing take-home DBQs (document-based-questions). Remember those? Anyway, one of the questions they were doing involved a brief passage from part of Hsu's book. I remember noticing it and remarking to my daughter that I went to grad school with Hsu.

Somehow this swirl of connections—Trump, book purges, Madeline Hsu, my own grad school education, my daughter's education, the AP exam—all came together in this one moment, and I thought: What are we doing here? The right has been warning about cultural suicide for decades, and it's all nonsense because it's premised on the fundamental lie that is racism. But this assault that the right is making on everything we know? That is cultural suicide. I'd start writing the autopsy now, but I fear that will be purged, too.