The DEI Books
By 
Bad mojo at the US Naval Academy.
Maya Angelou’s seminal autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and books on the Holocaust were included on the Navy’s list of 381 books that were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library on the Annapolis, Md., campus this week because their subject matter was seen as being related to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion topics…
The list also includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s examination of depictions of women in the Holocaust, and “How to Be Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi. Also listed are “The Making of Black Lives Matter,” by Christopher J. Lebron; “How Racism Takes Place,” by George Lipsitz; “The Fire This Time,” edited by Jesmyn Ward; “The Myth of Equality,” by Ken Wytsma; studies of the Ku Klux Klan, and the history of lynching in America.
The list also includes books about gender and sexuality, like “Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex” by Elizabeth Reis, and “Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes” by Gerald N. Callahan. President Trump issued a separate executive order in January proclaiming that there are only two sexes.
The USNA is an undergraduate institution designed to produce fully rounded officers in the US Navy and the US Marine Corps. Part of that education has historically been to produce a robust understanding of the country and people that the US armed forces are supposed to be defending. Maya Angelou and Ibram Kendi and Black Lives Matter are part of that country and that people; removing the books is unconscionable.
It doesn’t look as if Reuben Greene’s book was cut, but then I don’t know if it was in the library in the first place. It certainly should be.