Navy Chief Omits Critical Race Theory Books from Updated Reading List

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday released an updated recommended reading list for sailors on Friday, and books on critical race theory he had recommended last year are absent from the new list.

Last year, Gilday prompted harsh criticism from Republican lawmakers for including, in a list of 36 books, How to Be an Antiracist by critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi; We Can’t Talk About That at Work: How to Talk about Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Polarizing Topics; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

This year, the list is pared down to 12 books that mostly focus on naval strategy, with the exceptions of a book on women in combat and another on empathetic leadership.

“The list has been reduced in scope in order to focus more tightly on the topics of greatest importance to professional mariners. Reducing the overall number of books also enables Sailors to establish a goal of reading all the books in the program throughout the course of the year,” said Navy Cdr. Courtney Hillson.

Rep. Jim Banks, Navy reservist and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, raised concerns with Gilday over last year’s reading list including How to Be an Antiracist, which argued that capitalism and the Navy were racist.

Gilday wrote back that he included the book because “it evokes the author’s own personal journey in understanding barriers to true inclusion, the deep nuances of racism and racial inequalities,” and that he wanted sailors to achieve the same level of “self reflection,” according to Fox News.

Banks later confronted Gilday during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Gilday angrily responded, “This is a bigger issue than Kendi’s book. What this is really about is trying to paint the United States military, and in this case, the United States Navy as weak — as ‘woke.'”

But Banks on Sunday said he was “encouraged” by the new list.

He tweeted, “I’m encouraged to have learned that anti-American radical Ibram X Kendi’s CRT manifesto ‘How To Be An Antiracist’ has been removed from the Navy’s reading list.”

Gilday said in a statement after releasing his updated reading list, “A learning mindset is essential to accelerating our warfighting advantage…A Navy that learns, adapts, and improves the fastest will be the most successful. Knowledge sharing is essential to creating a learning culture.”

“We are driving a fleet-wide campaign of self-improvement,” he added. “We must foster an organization that supports and empowers Sailors to have an independent quest for knowledge through reading and information sharing. What you know and how fast you learn is relevant in this era of strategic competition.”

After vowing to root out extremists from the military and launching a Countering Extremism Working Group early on in the Biden administration, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would not say during a recent hearing whether countering extremism was still a top priority at the department.

After a year of research, the working group found that there were fewer than 100 individuals engaging in extremist activities in the military.

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