Naval Academy Junks 381 ‘Woke’ Library Books
Subscribe to future audio versions of AmRen articles here.On April 4, the US Naval Academy released a list of the 381 books it took out of circulation from its Nimitz Library, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a clampdown on DEI and gender nonsense.
I don’t like “book burning.” With only a few exceptions, books are as much symptom as cause. Did Robin DiAngelo’s awful White Fragility, which sold millions of copies and was a New York Times best seller for more than two years, change many minds? Or did it sell only because years of anti-white propaganda and George Floyd madness had prepared the ground?
In either case, I’m opposed to taking it out of libraries. Likewise, if the United States ever comes to its senses, I don’t want to take down the absurd Martin Luther King monument in DC or rename all the streets that now tell us where black people live. I want them left as reminders of how far self-hatred can go.
When the Naval Academy announced it was pruning the collection, the New York Times — probably tipped off by a leaker — warned that even benign titles could get the ax: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein on Race and Racism, and a biography of Jackie Robinson. Other publications parroted this, but when the Times reported on the final cut, it of course failed to mention that all three of those titles were spared.
The final list has a lot of anti-white rubbish and glorification of what we used to call sexual craziness, but there are some surprises. Here are the first dozen entries.
Click here for the full-size image.
Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is number one, but the titles aren’t in any particular order. I had never heard of most of the 381 books, but was not surprised to see the standard anti-white canon: books by Tim Wise, Joe Feagin, Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson, Noel Ignatiev, and Mari J. Matsuda. I’d never heard of America, Amerikkka or Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? or Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil, but I have probably heard every argument in them a hundred times.
There is no end to the ways people try to rub our noses in “racism,” but I wonder how many midshipmen ever checked out titles such as Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature; or Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race; or Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts.
There isn’t much racially oriented fiction on the list, but it includes The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid. He is one of those subcontinentals who swan their way through elite Western institutions — in his case, Princeton, Harvard Law, McKinsey & Company — and hate us all the more for it. In this extermination-fantasy novel, white people start turning brown, and the happy ending is when the last white man makes that wonderful transition, and newly-brown people start having brown babies.
I don’t know much about gender/queer/trans literature but, again, who at the academy ever read The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime or The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism? I don’t think many aspiring soldiers want to read Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul.
Some of the choices make no sense. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl is the infuriating story of David Reimer, whose penis was mutilated in a botched circumcision in 1967. An early “gender-fluid” proponent named John Money persuaded his parents to rear the boy as a girl, because sexual behavior is not inherent but taught. Neither dresses nor hormones could make Reimer feel female, and he killed himself at age 38. This is a recognition of the power of genes, and a poignant anti-gender/queer book.
I was surprised by some of the race books on the list. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen is an excellent book of discussions with the greatest race-realist scientist who ever lived. It’s the opposite of “woke.”
The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration is a book of long interviews with “white nationalists,” including Michael Levin, Samuel Francis, Wayne Lutton, David Duke, Don Black, and your servant. It is by no means a smear or a caricature, but a laudable attempt — by a black woman — to understand white racial consciousness.
I have never read The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. It’s probably sensationalized, but it seems to be a serious study of the 1920 Klan revival — which really was far more widespread than most people realize.
Finally, this book got the chop: The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. It is often touted as proof that “diversity” is wonderful, but the author is promoting cognitive diversity or different mental approaches and backgrounds — not racial diversity — and warns that people must have basic commonalities in order to work well together.
So it’s a queer list, to be sure, and you might enjoy browsing it. The other service academies are reportedly going through their collections, too. I have not heard of any orders to acquire antidotes to DEI, CRT, and gender/queer stuff, so I suspect officers-in-training will not start finding my books in their libraries.
