Memo to Secretary Hegseth: There are no snowflakes in Annapolis

Boston Globe

14-05-2025

I have been thinking about my old friend,
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'A wide array of books on race and gender were targeted,'
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According to the Pentagon, the books were removed to comply with the Trump administration's drive to
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To be sure, many of the titles on the purge list — such as 'How to Be An Antiracist' by Ibram X. Kendi, 'White Fragility' by Robin DiAngelo, and 'Gender Queer' by Maia Kobabe — reflect a left-wing, 'woke' ideology. But the list also includes Maya Angelou's acclaimed autobiography, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'; Matthew Delmont's 'Half American,' an award-winning history of Black military heroism during World War II; and a bestseller about a racehorse by the novelist Geraldine Brooks, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent.
To anyone who knew Perlmutter, the idea that his book would be culled because of DEI radicalism is preposterous. He was an outspoken
opponent
of affirmative action and conventional lefty thinking, sometimes to the consternation of his more politically correct colleagues.
Again and again in his writing, he
Well before the first Europeans arrived in the New World, he pointed out, some American Indian tribes engaged in slavery and mass murder. And while he deplored the long and varied history of intolerance in the United States, he deplored even more those who refused to acknowledge the nation's extraordinary record of progress.
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'Underlying all my thoughts,' he declared in the preface to
Whoever decided that Perlmutter's book could no longer appear on the shelves of the Naval Academy library obviously knew nothing about its contents or its author. I don't know if my late friend would have supported Trump, but he would undoubtedly have supported the administration's professed goal of ending group preferences and judging people on the basis of
On the other hand, Perlmutter — who dropped out of high school to join the Army and fight in World War II — would have been appalled at the notion that American soldiers and sailors are such delicate snowflakes that they must be shielded from access to books about race and gender. Libraries, especially university libraries, are
supposed
to encompass a wide array of topics, outlooks, and messages. The Naval Academy's
Censorship and book bans will not build a stronger Navy, nor will they produce better leaders. If intellectual freedom should be nonnegotiable anywhere, surely it is in a great public library. Phil Perlmutter would have been appalled by the book purge in Annapolis, and if he could call to talk about it, I know just what he would say: 'Are they out of their minds?'
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Jeff Jacoby can be reached at