Two of my books are among the 381 volumes that the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered from the library US Naval Academy because they were deemed to relate to the subjects of diversity, equity or inclusion.
The arbitrary abolition of these books reveals a sophomoric approach to history by searching for words. This amateur tactic of connecting the title and the theme has already resulted in comic but depressing results. A recent purge At Pentagon, led to the abolition of its digital archives of images of the B-29 Enola Gay plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, probably due to the word “gay” in the title. The Ministry of Defense is again on a larger scale, with higher issues: our great American democratic experience.
Censorship by searching for keywords is not only anti -intellectual but also stupid, assuming that there is a solidarity of thought or unanimity of vision with regard to race, sex, sexuality or class – as if each author who uses a certain term makes the same argument on the question. Researchers, writers and other thinkers are a notoriously acarious lot. We often find useful or sometimes mean means not to agree even with those with whom we must agree.
Many of these deleted books argue with the dominant concepts of breed, class, sex and sex. Some criticize the previous or competing versions of these subjects and defend an implacable revision and a tireless question.
The influential of Ibram X. Kendi “how to be an anti -racist” is at the top of the list of deleted books, but with a more attentive examination, the Ministry of Defense could have maintained it, because it pleads for a radically different vision of racism than many key predecessors and colleagues from Kendi.
The thinkers of the old -fashioned race maintain that racism concerns power. They would say that although the Black Folk can be fanatical, harmful and deliberately biased, they cannot technically be racist. Kendi breaks such a paradigm and maintains that one is racist or anti -racist, whatever his color or his circumstance. This should suggest to white criticism that Kendi is even struggling with the manifestation of belief or racist behavior on the part of people from all the middle. Trump administration Declared in January That students should not be “forced to adopt identities as victims or oppressors only depending on their skin color”. In a very different political register, Kendi's work reaches a similar conclusion.
In one of my banned books, “Tears we can't stop: A Sermon to White America”, I discuss white guilt as a strategy of social change. In my other deleted book, “Long Time Coming: Reckoning With Race in America”, I offer a hard reprimand to cancel the culture on the left in a way for the very white supremacy that it aims to destroy.
Hegseth does not seem to understand, or worry about knowing that most of the books with which he fears and does not constitute, and thus deletes, offer nuanced and complicated visions of race and other forms of diversity.
These books are not dogmatic or indoctrine; They are self -criticism and invite readers to question their own understanding. Courageous curiosity and open -minded commitment should lead us to read wide to determine what we love and what we do not like, with which we agree and what we oppose. This contributes to what we are informed that citizens support our democratic experience. The state has no company that shrinks the reading lists of a perch of partisan fear.
It is bitterly ironic that the political party which rages against ideological orthodoxy, the signaling of virtue and purity tests is now their most brutal exponent. The war against “sensitivity” is a war against illumination. His defenders despise science and are allergic to curiosity and reason. Instead, they embrace denial, ignorance, avoidance, erasure and amnesia.
The HegSeth movement offers the nation an overview of the frightening fascist imagination. Its characteristics are harmful. He designs dissent as disloyalty. He distorts vulnerable populations like freeloaders and fraud. This transforms a healthy skepticism with regard to the government into disadvantaged paranoia with regard to “the deep state”.
However, there are good news. Fascist imagination is not yet the fascist state. The fascist imagination points to a toxic authoritarianism which emerges as a legitimate policy. We must oppose the fascist imagination with a vision of the emancipated world which fights the illusion of security that fascism offers.
The vision of the emancipated world also establishes links between the “white” classics accepted and the “black” books designed – and those of other various communities – in this perilous moment. There can be 381 perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusion which are now purged of the naval academy, but there are literally thousands of classical literary paths for these ideas to come back.
If James Baldwin is despised, ignored Ralph Ellison, the Wood Web despised, Toni Morrison disdained and Maya Angelou dissected, we can read the race and other identities through the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel de Montaigne, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We can interpret complex cultural concepts using the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson or Thomas Gray.
The company must also reject while the republican administration is trying to bleach public school programs, kindergarten. We can also establish Saturday schools where we practice provocative pedagogy to teach our children the books that are prohibited. We can fight in a creative way in black communities with ideas that are deemed dangerous and disturbing, but which import greatly to Black Folk under attack. These schools could usefully thwart the burst of decrees that seek to erase history, deny the truth, perpetuate lies and avoid the community.
We must also support local museums in the history of blacks that preserve memory and transmit knowledge. It is tragic that blacks for which reading was formerly prohibited is in a loop to a culture hostile to black cultural literacy. It would be tragic to allow a renewed taboo against the exploration of the intellectual heritage of black life and to underline the crucial black contribution to American democracy.
One of the best ways to fight autocracy is to remember that racism is a dry race for fascism. All the characteristics of the fascist imagination have been repeated in the despised effort to remove black speech, oppress black culture, control black mobility and reduce black progress. Fascism applies to wider culture than racist principles first applied to dark life.
Many other Americans become as honorary blacks in the ill -treatment they endure in the fascist imagination – which, beyond targeting many whites who voted for Trump, tries to erase other racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, people and women LGBTQ +. Therefore, the struggle to defend Black Liberty is the struggle to maintain American freedom. The black fight for democracy is the American struggle for democracy.
Hegseth may have targeted “awakened” America with his book Ban, but his beliefs and those of his boss, ridicule and threaten the whole nation. Today, the danger concerns 381 pounds with which the Secretary of Defense assumes that he would disagree; Tomorrow, our very freedom may be openly disagreeing on the administration is in danger.
Instead that our democracy died in the darkness of a budding dictatorship, we must insist that our democracy is an open book to read by all citizens.
Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of African-American studies at Vanderbilt University and author, more recently co-author of “Representative: the unfinished struggle for the vote. “”
