I hate to admit it, but my authorial ego was bruised by wading through the list of 381 books pulled from the Nimitz Library of the U. S. Naval Academy last week. It tallied the volumes  expelled by order of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for committing the grave sins of advocating and documenting aspects of work for racial and gender justice, particularly its recent incarnation in programs lumped together as DEI.

I was bummed out because, after all, I’ve published four books on racial justice. They got several decent reviews, sold some thousands of copies, and have turned up in footnotes and bibliographies of much better-known tomes. This is a sign that at least a few serious people had taken note of them.

My books were forged from direct experience and much research on a time of wide-ranging and often violent struggle for racial justice. They covered   Selma’s Bloody Sunday; the Poor Peoples Campaign; Black Power (“By any means necessary!”). Writing them, I considered each as documentation of radical challenges to an evil status quo.  Surely at least one of them should have caught the sharp eye of a diligent censor.

But no.

Fer pete’s sake. Can’t a weary superannuated scribbler catch a break?

But on Friday April 4, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s lightning visit to the Academy was over, and pushed aside by bigger news of tariffs, floods, and other catastrophes, I got hold of the full list of 381 purged books.

I went through it line by depressing line. Then I turned to the keyboard for some context and followup.

And now I feel better.

Ego aside, it was an intriguing experience going thru the purge spreadsheets. Presumably the winnowing had a real ”audience” of one, namely Hegseth, or an underling assigned to read such files. I expected Hegseth would pronounce the USNA list a good start, yet call sternly for unsleeping vigilance against the future efforts at subversive infiltration which were certain to come.

He ordered the purges as integral parts of the current president’s drive (which Hegseth fully shares) to eradicate all things civil rights or otherwise racially tinged or tainted by gender issues from the military realms.

I figured that explained why the very first book on the list turned out to be no less than Ibram Kendi’s “foundational” tome on the topic, How to Be an Antiracist –particularly as it is  today discredited and pilloried, with the Boston academic center Kendi founded on its early success now abandoned, broke, and set to close in June.

Then right below it on the discard heap, as if to underscore the message of overthrow and submission, was Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, by Emmanuel Acho.

In the new Hegseth-Trump regime, clearly we’ll have no more such encounters; and the wise persons of color summoned into the presence of the Most High will surely take care to avoid appearing uncomfortable, while being sure to thank their superiors effusively and repeatedly.

It might also explain why on page 19 of the small print, #381, the very bottom line, is for a title, “Implementing Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion : A Handbook for Academic Libraries.”

Its bringing-up-the-rear slot seems patently a mark of the crescendo of disdain the SecDef and his boss have for all it helped spawned and represents.

In fact, by the time I found this final fillip, I had noticed that many on the list came in topical clusters — such as the three right above the last (#377-379), which all dealt with expunging the matter of “Managing Diversity in the Military.”

But Hegseth doesn’t “manage” the Defense Department; his obsession is with “lethality,”  preparing killers to be uninhibitedly and uniformly deadly. Anything else is a distraction, or –as with DEI– subversive.

Yet if so, why did the staff at the Academy’s Nimitz Library who made the selection, wander so deeply from the battlefield into the weeds of liberal arts to corral such works as, Romantic Friendship in Victorian literature, (#311) by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, or Gender and Medieval Drama, (#316) by Katie Normington? What did this have to do with lethality?

Silly me. These and several others were among one of the longest, largest clusters, around gender, which is adjacent to sex, and liable to slide over into first, LGB, and then, second, crash headlong into the explicitly forbidden (and allegedly anti-lethal) big T.

Trans, poor trans: so many in the uniforms, with so many spotless records, so trampled upon anyway. The book hunters brought in a major harvest of treatises on what was epitomized in The lives of Transgender People, by Beemyn and Rankin (#204). That cluster was fifty-plus books devoted, some only rather obliquely, to gender identity and issues.

But even though a wide anti-DEI net was cast, there were big holes in it: nowhere were biographies of major movement figures (MLK, Rustin, Douglass, et al), or overall histories of race relations (except for Kendi’s other main book, Stamped from the Beginning, which turns up as #107, but is not really in that category). And some major figures in racial ideology were also missing.

This too was puzzling: had they decided to keep the bios & the thick histories? (If they have any? I wondered.) For that matter, during his Academy visit, Hegseth was not quoted as mentioning any of the taboo DEI words in articles by the New York Times or two official DOD releases.

First of all, YES — my four books are on its shelves. All had escaped the reaper’s scythe.

But there was more at the Nimitz, much more: biographies of major civil rights and racial justice figures abounded (several pages full of books about Frederick Douglass alone). Many titles about Black Power, including the original manifesto Black Power, by the late Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton.

And if one wanted more racial militancy, books about slave insurrections are there, as well as on Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; even the works of W.E.B. DuBois, a proudly self-certified Communist.

And not least, the true gospel of racial revolution, according to its apostle himself: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is at hand.

Fanon is the real deal: he preaches unbound guerilla lethality; he commands and celebrates mass ruthless violence as the true way out of colonial oppression. His  fervor could be set beside the grimmest reports of slaughter in the Gaza-Israeli war (or the most fervid screeds of the Pentagon’s current head).

Which is to say, despite the efforts of the Hegseth-Trump crusade, the library of the U.S. Naval Academy still maintains a substantial set of resources on the main subjects the purgers are determined to eradicate. (Yes, including LGBTs: numerous titles on Stonewall and Harvey Milk, for starters.)

But then, what does this leave of the vaunted list of the banished 381?

My conclusion: it was a performance piece. A dog-and-pony show. An imitation of a genuine purge; despite its apparent breadth and heft, any midshipman who wants to taste of (or even wallow in) the forbidden fruit, has only to arrange to visit that abiding font of subversive and pot-stirring ideas and stories, the Nimitz Library, and be discreet.

(Or, more likely, smart future naval commanders can prepare themselves to face these matters intelligently after —hopefully soon —this censorship madness passes.) There they will find, not quite a top-drawer collection, but one quite well-stocked enough for a serious, mind-expanding start: LGBT, racial agitation; and even, perchance, one of mine.

Further, the arrangement of the list, by librarians or archivists unknown, displays not only shrewdness, but a calculated sense of presentation, and to my mind, even some arch archivist humor. If Hegseth were actually to go over it closely (odds against this being steep, as the Pentagon is the veritable Niagara Falls of ever-cascading paperwork), and if he had the subtle wit of which there has been so very little public evidence, he might detect that between its multitude of lines, he and his patron’s crusade were being slyly but repeatedly mocked all the way through.

“You wanted a purge list, Sir,” its pages breathed to me, “well here it is, Sir.”

Meanwhile to others, there is a wink and a nod which adds, sotto voce: “this so-called radical change, in fact changes very little.”

(I can picture a group of the list conspirators, gathered in the back room of one of those half-clandestine librarian-archivist taprooms, where they cluster, chattering, chuckling, flirting (quietly, of course) while imbibing such classic concoctions as Tequila Mockingbird, Huckleberry Gin, and Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaritas. . . .

All while  throwing shade on whatever the Army rivals at West Point might produce, in their  bleak warren where the only literarily credible relief is in 100 Beers of Solitude . . . . In these difficult times, they’re feeling gratified with their work.)

The task had sounded formidable at first: Hegseth is dead–err, lethally— set on crushing these “enemies within.” They were obliged to round up all three copies of an especially troubling 2019 study: Dying of Whiteness : how the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s Heartland,  by Metzl. But they were able to mollify The Man with a sheaf of nineteen pages signifying little actual dilution of the library’s holdings, in small print.

If this is more than fantasy, these anarchist archivists had earned their restrained revelry. Had I been lucky enough to join them, I would have sat quietly in a corner, raising a large goblet of Uncle Tom’s Cabernet (a camouflage for ginger ale, given my own Quaker peculiarities), and pondering where this wily and dogged spirit of resistance will emerge and strike next.

White Reflections on Black Power, 1967 (out of print)

Uncertain Resurrection: The Poor Peoples Washington Campaign, 1969

Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South, 1974

Eating Dr. King’s Dinner, a Memoir, 2005