My Book, "White Too Long," Banned from US Naval Academy

The book bans are coming for American universities.

Dear #WhiteTooLong readers,

I was surprised last night 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 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 is 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 NYT best-seller list and was nominated for a National Book Award) and also includes Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory, Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust.

Photo credit: Jordi Escuer, The Empty Library (1995), Memorial at Bebelplatz, Berlin, Germany, 2009.

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.

  (Note: If you purchasing these books using links above, a portion of the proceeds go to support this newsletter)

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 is 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 College, Amherst College, and Swarthmore College. 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: “As the undergraduate college of our country’s naval service, the Naval Academy prepares young men and women to become professional officers of competence, character, and compassion in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.” As to what constitutes character, the first concept in the Naval Academy’s honor code 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 principal 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 fosters. 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 modeling courage and integrity.

This defilement of a respected academic institution by those who are 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.

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Four Simple Ideas to Push Back on Book Bans

Here’s one simple suggestion to push back on these book bans: support the authors on this list (or other similar authors) and help get these books on the shelves at institutions in your communities. A few concrete ideas:

1. Purchase one of the six books listed above on religion, race, and politics (Reminder: If you purchasing these books using links above, a portion of the proceeds go to support this newsletter).

   1. If there’s one you have particularly appreciated, buy a copy for a friend or family member today, or donate one to your religious congregation’s library.

   2. If there’s one you don’t have, purchase a copy as an act of solidarity today.

2. Contact your local public library and request that they purchase these books if they do not already have them available.

3. As your religious congregation to purchase one or all of these six books for its library and to set up a shelf for banned books. With public schools and institutions coming under attack, religious congregations can be a vital community resource.

4. Support PEN America, which tracks book bans and fights censorship in public schools and libraries across the country.

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20% Spring Discount Offer

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(Note: If you’d like to receive the benefits of being a paid subscriber but have been laid off or furloughed because of the Trump administration’s attack on our government, or otherwise cannot afford it, drop me a note at robertpjones.substack@gmail.com and I can arrange a comp paid subscription).