In January, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning various books on race, gender, and other topics from public schools for kindergarten through grade 12. Last week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the US Naval Academy that, though it is a college, the order applied to its library, too.
Yesterday, the Naval Academy released the list of books removed from its library, and several books by philosophers are on the list, including books by Linda Alcoff, Lawrence Blum, Steven C. Ferguson II, Janine Jones, Donald F. Koch, Chris Lebron, Mimi Marinucci, John H. McClendon III, J. Reid Miller, Charles Mills, Shannon Sullivan, Peter Wenz, Laura Westra, and George Yancy.
They are:
- Visible identities : Race, Gender, and the Self by Linda Martín Alcoff
- I’m Not a Racist, But– The Moral Quandary of Race by Lawrence Blum
- Pragmatism and the Problem of Race by Donald F. Koch
- Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics by Joy James
- The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea by Christopher J. Lebron
- Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection between Queer and Feminist Theory by Mimi Marinucci
- Beyond the White Shadow: Philosophy, Sports, and the African American Experience, edited by John H. McClendon III and Steven C. Ferguson II
- Stain Removal: Ethics and Race by J. Reid Miller
- Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race by Charles Mills
- Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege by Shannon Sullivan
- Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice, edited by Laura Westra and Peter S. Wenz.
- Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America by George Yancy
- Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, edited by George Yancy and Janine Jones
- White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem?, edited by George Yancy
(I may have missed some books by philosophers. Please let me know by email or in the comments if I did. Thanks.)
The complete list of 381 banned books is here.
UPDATE 3: Here’s a list of the banned philosophy books on Amazon, should you want to buy them.*
UPDATE 2: I missed a few philosophers in the original post; I’ve added them. Thanks to those who pointed out the omissions.
UPDATE 1: Top-notch commentary from Liam Kofi Bright on Bluesky:
* Buying books via that link supports Daily Nous.
Trump and the Republic CONS are deep into the uncensored (play)book of fascism. They will soon be banning Fahrenheit 451 and novels by Orwell, which increasingly seem more like works of nonfiction. But in a world where a great percentage of people read online, how does book banning work exactly in these situations?
Btw: A reminder that the “Tiny” (orange) Hands Off Protests are occurring today.
“It was just the prelude… Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.”
Well, at least these days there is no need to burn the books.
This is insanely fascist. On the first page I noticed that a novel was on the list, Evil Eye by Etaf Rum. Here is the Amazon blurb:
An NPR Best Book of the Year · A Time Magazine Most Anticipated Book of the Year.
“A moving meditation on motherhood, intergenerational trauma and how surface appearances often obscure a deeper truth. . . . A stunning second novel from a writer who set the bar very high with her first!”—Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics and Community Board
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man returns with a striking exploration of the expectations of a Palestinian-American woman, the meaning of a fulfilling life, and the ways our unresolved pasts affect our presents.
Wtf… do the censors lose their minds at “Palestinian”???
RH
Of course, no books should be removed from library shelves, at the Naval Academy or anywhere else.
Assuming however that the Naval Academy librarians felt they had no choice but to do something to show compliance with the (ridiculous) executive order, one wonders whether they have gone overboard, perhaps in an effort to underscore the absurdity of the whole thing. Or did the Trump admin tell them specifically which books to remove? It’s not clear.
Btw, among the removed books is one by Eleanor Maccoby (1917-2018), listed by the American Psychological Association as one of the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century.
Surely the simpler explanation is that employees of the US imperialist war machine (up to and including even its record keepers and librarians) aren’t particularly progressive or respectful of academic freedom and open inquiry, so they probably leapt at the chance to ban anything they could, right? I suppose I’m showing my cards here, but if you had asked me what my credence in “Naval Academy librarians would ban Charles Mills’s works if given the chance” was, I would’ve said “it’s pretty high!”
Your assumption that professors (many of whom are not members of the military btw) and librarians at the Naval Academy are not respectful of open inquiry is wrong, I think. If that were the case the Naval Academy library would probably not have been holding Charles Mills’s works in the first place.
For what it’s worth, I’ve known 4-5 people who have taught at West Point. All were current or (more often) former military officers. All were, quite obviously, “respectful of academic freedom and open inquiry.” Now, these people were at West Point, not the Naval Academy, and were instructors, not academic librarians, but still, this experience gives me pretty strong credence that you’re way off base here and that your claim isn’t backed up by any real evidence.
Maybe don’t speak from ignorance.
As someone who had worked for the Naval Academy, I can tell you that the US service academies (incl. West Point, Air Force Academy, Naval Postgrad. School, etc.) were among the first to critically press on the possibility of “killer robots” and other emerging war technologies.
These are not political appointees but dedicated people who understand the horrors of war more than the vast majority of us. As a result, they often are keen to protect free speech and other values that they and others have sacrificed and died for.
Librarians are also a special professional demographic that I find to be generally liberal. They’re in the business of preserving knowledge and history, not censoring it.
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” — Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Another book on the list by a philosopher: Stain Removal, by J. Reid Miller.
Thanks, Hannah. I’ve added Professor Miller and his book to the list.
Wonderful philosopher, Joy James’, wonderful work “Shadowboxing : Representations of Black Feminist Politics” is also unfortunately on the list.
Also on the list is a book with a foreword by Angela Davis (somebody who white mainstream philosophy seems to forget is a philosopher all too often). “State of emergency : how we win in the country we built” / Tamika
D.Mallory as told to Ashley A. Coleman ; [forewords, Angela Y. Davis and Cardi B].
Sadly, there’s also a large number of works by scholar activists that I have regularly taught in my philosophy classes… Michael Eric Dyson, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ijeoma Oluo, Derrick Bell, Heather McGhee, Jeannine Bell, Mari Matsuda, and others.
Let’s not forget the wonderful wisdom from Rage Against the Machine… “What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin. They don’t gotta burn the books they just remove ’em, While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells”.
I hope many of us philosophers were out in the streets protesting yesterday and that many more of us will continue to protest and RESIST.
Thanks, Matt. I’ve added Prof. James and her book to the list.
Just a quick note: I always thought of Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words (1993) as a philosophical (and just legal) work.
Mimi Marinucci is also a philosopher who has a book on this list.
Thanks, Andrew. I’ve now added Prof. Marinucci and her book to the list.
Apparently, Mein Kampf is still on the shelves there. Two copies in fact. An excerpt rom the NYT:
Gone is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s transformative best-selling 1970 memoir chronicling her struggles with racism and trauma.
Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.
Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.
“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced by white supremacists and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.
“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.
The Trump administration’s decision to order the banning of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library is a case study in ideological censorship, alumni and academics say.
Political appointees in the Department of the Navy’s leadership decided which books to remove. A look at the list showed that antiracists were targeted, laying bare the contradictions in the assault on so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
“Initially, officials searched the Nimitz Library catalog, using keyword searches, to identify books that required further review,” Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesman, said in a statement on Friday. “Approximately 900 books were identified during the preliminary search. Departmental officials then closely examined the preliminary list to determine which books required removal to comply with directives outlined in executive orders issued by the president.”
“This effort ultimately resulted in nearly 400 books being selected for removal from the Nimitz Library collection,” he added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/us/politics/naval-academy-banned-books.html