One evening 25 years ago, in the wardroom of our guided-missile destroyer, some fellow officers and I joked before dinner about who took the weakest classes in college. Once we’d had our fun, the conversation turned political. “What I want to know,” one officer began, “is why some schools offer women’s studies as a major! I mean, why isn’t there a men’s studies?” Before I could bite my tongue, my flippant response rolled out: “There is. It’s called history.” After some jostling, the group took the point: The prevailing stories are not the only ones that matter.
The Pentagon’s assault on diversity initiatives brought this memory back to mind. The latest casualty is the library at the United States Naval Academy. Officials at the college confirmed that nearly 1,000 books were flagged for potentially violating President Donald Trump’s executive order that requires schools to promote “patriotic education” and avoid those deemed to champion diversity, equity and inclusion. Ultimately, 381 titles were removed, charged with sowing division and pushing “anti-American, subversive” ideologies. Multiple books by Hitler survived the purge; a midshipman’s honors paper on police violence did not.
The rationale for banning these books and articles is as flimsy as the process by which they were chosen. As with other efforts to scrub federal websites by searching for specific keywords — ranging from “Black” and “women” to “equality” and “cultural differences” — the academy undertook a similar practice to identify books for removal from the library. Books by authors whose titles contained words such as “racial inequality” were taken off the shelves, while other books on the same subject — by the same authors but with less explicit titles — remain in circulation. The point of these executive actions isn’t to deny students information that can be easily accessed elsewhere, but to communicate whose history is notable and an example to us all — and whose is not.
The White House and Pentagon appear to believe that students — even midshipmen who swear an oath to the nation — will love the nation less if presented with its checkered history, discriminatory political interests and constitutional shortcomings. A close read of some of the banned books would show those concerns are unfounded. They contain histories of men and women who answered the call for service even though they could not vote, serve in combat under the American flag, seek equal justice in the courts or access veterans’ benefits. People who volunteer for military service don’t do so because the nation is perfect, they do so even though it is not — that sacrifice is what makes patriotism resilient.
Instead, the Pentagon is exercising a thin-skinned nationalism that bans books, fires senior military leaders who are disproportionately Black or female and believes diversity introduces weakness. In doing so, it mistakes colorblindness for the removal of unflattering histories and the refusal to acknowledge racial inequality. And it acts as though avoiding discussions of gender or race or injustice is a precondition for meritocracy. Not only is this wrong, but it also undermines military strength, readiness and cohesion.
Most of all, it messages a lack of faith in the men and women who wear the uniform, suggesting that they are capable of facing the ugliness of war but not the quietude of the university library. And that while they can put guided missiles on targets many miles away, they are helpless against the prose of an author with whom they might disagree.
The wardroom conversation turned to stories from our day at sea just as one of the ship’s two female officers walked in and joined us for dinner. This was the ship’s first deployment with women on board and integrated by race and gender at every level of leadership and operations. It was a historic deployment, filled with unit awards and commendations. And perhaps small evidence of two things the country should remember: Diversity offers strategic advantages to smart nations, and the histories of the people who constitute it matter, too.