Commentary: Hegseth purged two of my books on race. Did he actually read them?

Two of my books are among the 381 volumes that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered removed from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy because they were deemed to relate to the topics of diversity, equity or inclusion.

The arbitrary removal of these books reveals a sophomoric approach to history by word search. That amateurish tactic of linking title and theme has already resulted in comical yet depressing results. A recent DEI purge at the Pentagon led to the removal in its digital archive of images of the B-29 plane Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, presumably because of the word “gay” in the title. The Defense Department is at it again on a bigger scale, with higher stakes: our grand American democratic experiment.

Censorship by keyword search is not only anti-intellectual but also foolish, presuming that there is solidarity of thought or unanimity of vision when it comes to race, gender, sexuality or class — as though every author who uses a certain term is making the same argument on the issue. Scholars, writers and other thinkers are a notoriously cantankerous lot. We often find useful or sometimes petty ways to disagree even with those with whom we ought to agree.

Many of these removed books argue with prevailing notions of race, class, sex and gender. Some are critical of earlier or competing versions of these subjects and advocate relentless revision and tireless interrogation.

Ibram X. Kendi’s influential “How to Be an Antiracist” topped the list of removed books, but with more careful consideration the Defense Department might have kept it around, because it argues for a radically different view of racism than many of Kendi’s scholarly predecessors and colleagues.

Old-school race thinkers argue that racism concerns power. They would say that although Black folk can be bigoted, prejudiced and willfully biased, they technically can’t be racist. Kendi shatters such a paradigm and argues that one is either racist or antiracist, whatever one’s color or circumstance. That ought to suggest to white critics that Kendi is being evenhanded in grappling with the manifestation of racist belief or behavior from people of any background. The Trump administration stated in January that students should not be “compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color.” In a far different political register, Kendi’s work comes to a similar conclusion.

In one of my banished books, “Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America,” I argue against white guilt as a strategy for social change. In my other removed book, “Long Time Coming: Reckoning With Race in America,” I offer a harsh rebuke to cancel culture on the left as a proxy of sorts for the very white supremacy it aims to destroy.

Hegseth doesn’t seem to understand, or care to know, that most of the books he fears and disagrees with, and thus removes, offer nuanced and complicated visions of race and other forms of diversity.

These books are not dogmatic or indoctrinating; they are self-critical and invite readers to question their own understandings. Courageous curiosity and open-minded engagement should lead us to read widely to determine what we like and what we don’t like, what we agree with and what we oppose. This contributes to us being informed citizens upholding our democratic experiment. The state has no business shrinking reading lists from a perch of partisan fear.

It is bitterly ironic that the political party that rages against ideological orthodoxy, virtue signaling and purity tests is now their most brutal exponent. The war against “wokeness” is a war against enlightenment. Its advocates despise science and are allergic to curiosity and reason. Instead, they embrace denial, ignorance, avoidance, erasure and amnesia.

Hegseth’s move offers the nation a peek into the frightening fascist imagination. Its characteristics are noxious. It conceives of dissent as disloyalty. It misrepresents vulnerable populations as freeloaders and frauds. It turns healthy skepticism about government into unhinged paranoia about the “deep state.”

Yet there is good news. The fascist imagination is not yet the fascist state. The fascist imagination points toward a poisonous authoritarianism that masquerades as legitimate politics. We must oppose the fascist imagination with an emancipated worldview that combats the illusion of security that fascism offers.

The emancipated worldview also draws connections between accepted “white” classics and spurned “Black” books — and those of other diverse communities — in this perilous moment. There may be 381 perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion that are now purged from the Naval Academy, but there are literally thousands of classic literary avenues for those ideas to get back in.

If James Baldwin is slighted, Ralph Ellison ignored, W.E.B. Du Bois despised, Toni Morrison disdained and Maya Angelou dissed, we can read race and other identities through the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We can interpret complicated cultural concepts by using the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson or Thomas Gray.

Society must also push back as the Republican administration tries to whitewash the curricula of public schools, from kindergarten on up. We can also establish Saturday schools where we practice defiant pedagogy to teach our children the books that are banned. We can creatively wrestle in Black communities with ideas that are deemed dangerous and troubling, but which matter greatly to Black folk under attack. Such schools might usefully counter the flurry of executive orders that seek to erase history, deny truth, perpetuate lies and eviscerate community.

We must also support local museums of Black history that preserve memory and transmit knowledge. It is tragic that Black folks for whom reading was once outlawed are brought full circle to a culture that is hostile to Black cultural literacy. It would be tragic to allow a renewed taboo against exploring the intellectual heritage of Black life and underscoring the crucial Black contribution to American democracy.

One of the best ways to combat autocracy is to remember that racism is a dry run for fascism. All the features of the fascist imagination have been rehearsed in the spitefully creative effort to suppress Black speech, oppress Black culture, control Black mobility and to curtail Black progress. Fascism applies to the broader culture the racist principles first applied to Black life.

Many other Americans become like honorary Black folk in the mistreatment they endure in the fascist imagination — which, beyond targeting many white folks who voted for Trump, tries to erase other racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and women. Therefore, the fight to uphold Black liberty is the fight to uphold American liberty. The Black fight for democracy is the American fight for democracy.

Hegseth may have targeted “woke” America with his book ban, but his beliefs, and those of his boss, ridicule and threaten the entire nation. Today the peril is for 381 books with which the secretary of Defense assumes he would disagree; tomorrow it may be that our very freedom to openly disagree about the administration is at risk.

Instead of our democracy dying in the dark of an aspiring dictatorship, we must insist that our democracy be an open book to be read by all citizens.

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Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of African American studies at Vanderbilt University and an author, most recently co-author of “Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote.”