The United States Navy announced tonight that, following Trump’s anti-DEI orders, it has purged 381 books from the US Naval Academy Library. The press coverage focuses on some familiar titles: Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and so on. I went through the entire list, and noticed something quite different. First, to call this a DEI purge is to miss the forest for the trees: This is a wholesale assault on knowledge as we know it. Charles Mills’s book is purged. Two books on Henry James are purged. A book on Eliot, Joyce, and Proust is purged. Books on Elizabeth Bishop, on Thomas Pynchon, on Richard Wright: purged. Barbara Fields’s and Karen Fields’s Racecraft is […]