Nobel and Pulitzer Prize Winning Novelist, Public Intellectual, Critic, and Teacher Toni Morrison (1931-2019) Is One of the Most Banned Authors in American Literary History. What Does This Tell You About the United States and the White Supremacist Politics Of Race, Class, and Gender in American Culture and the Notorious Western Literary Canon?

"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."

--Langston Hughes, 1902-1967

 

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2022/09/14/truth-trouble-toni-morrisons-advocacy-against-censorship
 

Truth Is Trouble: Toni Morrison’s Advocacy Against Censorship
by Leah Drayton, Communications
September 14, 2022
New York Public Library

Toni Morrison.  NYPL

In observation of Banned Books Week 2022, The New York Public Library is dedicating a spotlight to one of American literature’s most renowned authors and powerful advocates against censorship: Toni Morrison.

Both celebrated and censored, Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Through all her renown, Morrison’s books are a regular fixture on the American Library Association (ALA)’s Frequently Challenged Books list, with her novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye consistently challenged in schools and libraries. Morrison’s novels, which explore the Black experience from slavery and Reconstruction to the Great Depression to the Korean War, have been challenged for their unflinching exposition of racism, violence, and sexism.

Celebrating Morrison’s legacy for Banned Books Week is more than just acknowledging the rich storytelling she gifted us through these narratives of the Black experience. Toni Morrison was an ebullient warrior against censorship, outwardly and powerfully advocating for libraries and open access to literature for decades.

“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded,” said Morrison. “Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say 'touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not a barrier.' If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.”

While spending five decades teaching, editing, supporting emerging writers, and publishing plays, novels, children’s books, essays, and even a libretto, Morrison was named a Library Lion in 1982, joined NYPL's board in 1985, and was named a Life Trustee of the Library in 2006.

As Morrison wrote “fear of unmonitored writing is justified—because truth is trouble” (Burn This Book, 2009). Join NYPL to take a stand against censorship by exploring Morrison’s advocacy for open access to reading.

As part of NYPL’s Banned Books Week celebration, The New York Public Library is honoring Morrison through giveaways, public programming, and book talks for Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and other commonly banned books for all ages. See more here.



Morrison's words are engraved on a wall at NYPL's 42nd Street flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building.

 
Read Morrison’s Most Challenged Books

The New York Public Library is honoring Banned Books Week (September 18–24) with instant digital access to Toni Morrison’s novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye through our free e-reader app, SimplyE. Both these titles will be available for unlimited checkout to anyone with an NYPL library card from September 15 through October 31. There will also be giveaways of these books in our branches.


The Bluest Eye (1970)
 

Set in the Depression Era, The Bluest Eye follows 11-year-old African American Pecola Breedlove who is consistently regarded as "ugly" by those around her due to her mannerisms and dark skin. Facing increasingly violent racism and sexual abuse, Pecola prays for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye has been challenged for “depictions of child sexual abuse” and “sexually explicit content.”



Beloved (1987)
 

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this novel follows formerly enslaved Sethe, whose household is haunted by the malignant ghost of her baby. Based on the true story of Margaret Garner, the controversy of the novel includes Sethe’s painful reflection on killing her own daughter to spare her from the horrors of slavery and the scathing exposition of the torture of American slavery.
Toni Morrison on Banned Books

The Letters in the Bathroom

This year, the ALA reports a record number of challenges to remove books from the shelves of schools and libraries. (The Bluest Eye is on 2021’s list.)

“I’m probably a little silly, perhaps, about the banning of my books,” said Morrison in a 2009 interview with NPR. “I tend not to pay an awful lot of attention to it, most of the instances I know about fall into the category of the absurd.”

Morrison’s awareness of the absurdity included the censorship and celebration of her voice. Listen to this NYPL talk with Angela Davis where she describes the two letters hanging in her bathroom—an invitation to accept her Nobel Peace Prize and a letter informing her that Paradise has been banned due to its potential to incite the “breakdown of prisons.”


Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 

Morrison’s most notable experience with a banned book was with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where she first expressed the same arguments those who contested the book had:

“Fear and alarm are what I remember the most about my first encounter [with the novel],” pens Morrison. “Palpable alarm. [The novel] chosen randomly, without guidance or recommendation, was deeply disturbing.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been challenged in public libraries across the country and taken off shelves for its use of profanity (namely the use of the n-word) and for the morality of the protagonist.

But a new outcry against book banning in the 1980s piqued Morrison’s interest as an adult. In a 1996 edition of the book, for which she wrote the introduction, she expressed her new stance on book banning:

“[Banning] stuck me as a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem, band-aid the solution.” Morrison admitted she now loved the book and explained the dangers of dismissing a book immediately.

A rare version of the Morrison edition is available in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building General Research Division.

Burn This Book

 

Morrison would go on to talk about book banning in Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement, a collection of essays she edited advocating for freedom of speech and against banning books in educational and public institutions. The book includes insights from contemporary authors with Morrison’s introduction focusing on the act of banning books:

“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
 

Read More of Toni Morrison's Works at NYPL

Novels:

The Bluest Eye (1970)

Sula (1973)

Song of Solomon (1977)

Tar Baby (1981)

Beloved (1987)

Jazz (1992)

Paradise (1997)

Love (2003)

A Mercy (2008)

Home (2012)

God Help the Child (2015)

A Selection of Children’s Books (written with her late son Slade Morrison):

Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)

The Tortoise or the Hare (2011)

Please, Louise (2014)

Poetry:

Five Poems

Music:

Margaret Garner: An Opera in Two Acts (composed by Richard Danielpour)

Morrison revisits the tragedy of Margeret Garner through opera. The libretto is a loose retelling of the tale that inspired Beloved.

Learn more about how the Library is observing Banned Books Week 2022, including our Banned Books Reading List, free programs and events discussing Banned Books and Toni Morrison’s work, book giveaways, and more.


https://time.com/6143127/toni-morrison-book-bans/

History
Education

 
Why Toni Morrison’s Books Are So Often the Target of Book Bans

A 1992 photo of author Toni Morrison at home 

James Keyser—Getty Images

by Olivia B. Waxman
January 31, 2022
TIME

In Florida’s Polk County, Nobel Literature Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Morrison’s Beloved were among 16 books “quarantined”—taken off shelves in public school libraries “so a thorough, thoughtful review of their content can take place,” a spokesperson explained to The Ledger—on Jan. 25 after a complaint. Less than a week earlier, a school board in Wentzville, Missouri had voted 4-3 to remove The Bluest Eye from the district’s high school libraries at a board meeting on Jan. 20. The decisions are just two examples of a wave of book bans and challenges to school libraries’ content currently occurring across the U.S.

“By all means, go buy the book for your child,” Sandy Garber, a director of the Wentzville school board, said at the meeting, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see.” (Garber did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.)

The board members overruled recommendations by a committee of educators who reviewed the novel after a parent objected to depictions of pedophilia, incest, and rape. That committee had voted 8-1 to retain the book in district libraries. “This novel helps the reader step into and understand 1941 (pre WWII, pre civil rights movement), small town Black culture in a way no textbook can do,” the committee wrote in a report. “Removing the work would infringe on the rights of parents and students to decide for themselves if they want to read this work of literature.”

Read more: ‘Critical Race Theory Is Simply the Latest Bogeyman.’ Inside the Fight Over What Kids Learn About America’s History

Morrison’s works are a regular fixture on the American Library Association (ALA)’s annual list of the top 10 most challenged books. The Bluest Eye has appeared several times, in 2006, 2013, 2014, and 2020. Beloved, Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, is also on the 2006 and 2012 lists. And in the mid-1990s, Song of Solomon was repeatedly challenged in school districts in Colorado, Florida, and Georgia for “inappropriate” and “explicit” material.

In Oct. 2021, a Virginia mom who tried to get Beloved banned from her son’s high school in 2013 was featured in an ad for then-gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who made education a core part of his platform. He won the governorship the next month. (In 2016 and 2017, then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe—Youngkin’s opponent in the 2021 election—had vetoed so-called “Beloved bills,” efforts to enable parents to opt their children out from reading sexually-explicit novels at schools.)

Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, poses with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents in recent weeks on Dec. 16, 2021, in Salt Lake City. In Utah, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has opened an investigation after a suburban Salt Lake City district removed several books including Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye,” pending investigation into a parent complaint.Rick Bowmer—AP


Since the start of the 2021-2022 school year, the ALA says it’s seen an “unprecedented volume of challenges” aimed at books by, and about, people of color, and books that tackle topics like racism and sexual or gender identities. The moral panic is largely fueled by conservative advocacy groups spreading misinformation that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 schools. That is not the case.

Scholars say one of the reasons Morrison’s books in particular are controversial is because they address, unabashedly, nearly all of the above, centering on dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable for some people to talk about. Beloved, for example, is inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter in 1856 to spare her from slavery.

“What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy,” says Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, of Morrison’s body of work. “Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.”

A 2016 TIME analysis of college syllabi found that, at the time, Morrison was the third-most assigned female author in college classes.

Read more: Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88

Dana A. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society and dean of Howard University’s graduate school, adds that efforts to ban Morrison’s books are not only about their text, but also about Morrison herself, the first Black American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

“[Following] any advance by Black people, you will see some stirrings around banning a Toni Morrison book,” says Williams. “After the Black Lives Matter movement, after the 1619 Project, after the election of Barack Obama, any major moment in history where you see progress of people of color—Black people in particular—backlash will follow… Morrison books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.”

Morrison herself often spoke out against censorship, both of her work and more broadly. At a 1982 event, “An Evening of Forbidden Books,” she argued that such behavior constitutes “political control of a certain art form,” and that “there is some hysteria associated with the idea of reading that is all out of proportion to what is in fact happening when one reads.” And in the 2019 documentary The Pieces I Am, she talks about having a framed letter from the Texas prison system saying her book Paradise was removed because it could incite a riot, and thinking, “How powerful is that! I could tear up the whole place.”Her comments in the introduction of Burn This Book, a 2009 anthology of essays she edited on censorship issues, are especially appropriate for today. That same year a school district in Michigan had removed and then reinstated Song of Solomon from an AP English class. “Efforts to censor, starve, regulate and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place,” she wrote. “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”

The Vicious and Debilitating All Out Assault On Education, Literacy, Social and Economic Justice, Truth, and Free Speech Under the U.S. Fascist Regime and Political Psychosis of the GOP, MAGA, and the Utterly Tyrannical Scumbag-in-Chief: Part 1

"I think it’s a mistake — a very tempting mistake to make — to take stock by looking at what we still have rather than what we have already lost. Two and a half months has not been enough time for Trump to quash every single opposition voice, dismantle the electoral system, successfully intimidate every single judge and bring every single publication to heel. Is that good? Of course. But there is no way he could have done all of that in less than three months. He has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage, and I think damage is the more meaningful metric right now."
--Masha Gessen, ‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America. New York Times, April 4, 2025

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/04/03/400-books-removed-naval-academy-library

 

400 Books Removed From Naval Academy Library
by Johanna Alonso
April 3, 2025
Inside Higher Education

The U.S. Naval Academy has culled 400 books deemed to promote to diversity, equity and/or inclusion from its library at the insistence of the Trump administration, according to the Associated Press.

Last week, the Naval Academy, located in Annapolis, Md., identified 900 potential books to review in response to orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to remove books containing DEI-related content, The New York Timesreported. That list included The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein on Race and Racism, and a biography of Jackie Robinson. A list of the books that were ultimately removed has not been released.

The nation's five military academies were also told in February to eliminate admissions “quotas” related to sex, ethnicity or race after President Trump signed an executive order to remove “any preference based on race or sex” from the military. Both the Naval and Air Force Academies have also completed curriculum reviews to remove materials that allegedly promote DEI, and a West Point official also told the AP that it was prepared to review both curriculum and library materials if directed to do so by the Army.

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https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/the-history-books-purged-from-the
 

The History Books Purged From the Naval Academy's Library

 
The Trump administration is engaged in something much worse than book burning. It is attempting to burn down the entire cultural infrastructure that supports the pursuit of history.

by Kevin M. Levin
April 5, 2025
Substack

We now have a list of the 381 books that have been removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library in Annapolis, Maryland. Many of the books in the list fall under categories such as Critical Race Theory, Gender and Ethnic Studies, LGBTQ Studies, etc. They are easy targets in the Trump administration’s continuing war on free thought and the free exchange of ideas.

I have not read most of the books on this list, but I do want to single out six that I have read:

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew Delmont

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen


Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity by Donald Yacovone

Bind Us Apart: How Enligtened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicolas Guyatt

The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen Cox

The six books listed here are all mainstream history texts, published by mainstream presses. All of these authors, apart from Loewen, who taught in a sociology department before his passing in 2021, are respected scholars, who teach in history departments around the country.

Delmont’s book is the most conspicuous of the group. Half American is an incredibly engaging narrative about African Americans, who fought and died for this country during World War II. Its story is the story of the Department of the Navy and every other military branch.

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Loewen and Yacovone write about the ways in which the textbooks in our classrooms have reinforced narratives of white supremacy and covered up racial violence.

Guyatt’s book focuses on the story of white liberals between the Revolution and the Civil War, who pushed for a color-blind society, only to end up advocating for separate republics for the races.

Gordon’s book does a fantastic job of exploring the rise of the second Klan in the 1920s above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Finally, Karen Cox’s book is the best introduction to the history and controversy surrounding Confederate monuments that we have.

There is nothing subversive about any of these books unless you believe that simply telling the story of American racism, in a way that is accessible to anyone, is problematic. I wouldn’t think twice about recommending any of these books to high school and college students or anyone else interested in these subjects.

I say this as someone who is conscious about the ways in which politics and other contemporary concerns can undercut scholarship. Though I certainly don’t believe that you need to be a trained historian to write history, I tend to recommend and read authors who have chosen to specialize in it. History is a craft and the ability to think historically is a skill that takes time.

Mainstream history has now become a target of the Trump administration. It’s no longer possible to argue that Trump and his goons are simply concerned with what they perceive to be ‘radical’ or ‘un-American’ scholarship. Anything that challenges or undermines a view of this country as never having struggled with any form of discrimination is now considered a legitimate target.

I’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating. This is not a conservative v. liberal or Democrat v. Republican issue. What we are witnessing goes far beyond any previous political or public debate about what should be permissible to exhibit, research, and teach about American history.

The Trump administration is engaged in something much worse than book burning. It is attempting to burn down the entire cultural infrastructure that supports the pursuit of history.

ttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/04/us/250404-list-of-removed-books-from-nimitz-library.html
 

Read the Naval Academy’s list of removed books
April 4, 2025
New York Times

A PDF version of this document with embedded text is available at the link below:

Download the original document (pdf):

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/b9f07d9ade92f6f0/fcc8f9ac-full.pdf

https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/4146516/list-of-books-removed-from-usna-library/

Press Office  

Press Releases
 

List of Books Removed from USNA Library
April 4, 2025

U.S. Navy Press Office

Here is the full list of books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library collection March 31-April 1:

LINK HERE





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 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/supreme-court-trump-teacher-grants.html

Supreme Court Lets Trump Suspend Grants to Teachers

The justices allowed the Trump administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, which helped place teachers in poor and rural areas.


The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voting with the liberal justices in dissent, amounted to an early victory for the Trump administration before the court. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times

by Adam Liptak and Abbie VanSickle
Reporting from Washington
April 4, 2025
New York Times

The Supreme Court on Friday let the Trump administration temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants that the government contends would promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, an early victory for the administration in front of the justices.

The court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The temporary pause will remain in effect while the case is appealed.

The decision was 5 to 4, with five of the court’s conservatives — Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh — in the majority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.

The order came in response to one of a series of emergency requests by the Trump administration asking the justices to intervene and overturn lower court rulings that have temporarily blocked parts of President Trump’s agenda.

The grants at issue in the case helped place teachers in poor and rural areas and aimed to recruit a diverse work force reflecting the communities it served.

In February, the Education Department sent grant recipients boilerplate form letters ending the funding, saying the programs “fail to serve the best interests of the United States” by taking account of factors other than “merit, fairness and excellence,” and by allowing waste and fraud.

Eight states, including California and New York, sued to stop the cuts, arguing that they would undermine both urban and rural school districts, requiring them to hire “long-term substitutes, teachers with emergency credentials and unlicensed teachers on waivers.”

Judge Myong J. Joun of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts temporarily ordered the grants to remain available while he considered the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, rejected a request from the Trump administration to undo Judge Joun’s order, saying the government’s arguments were based on “speculation and hyperbole.”

In temporarily blocking the cancellation of the grants, Judge Joun said that he sought to maintain the status quo. He wrote that if he failed to do so, “dozens of programs upon which public schools, public universities, students, teachers and faculty rely will be gutted.” On the other hand, he reasoned, if he did pause the Trump administration action, the groups would merely continue to receive funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

In its brief order, the court said that the challengers had “not refuted” the Trump administration’s claim that “it is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed.” By contrast, the order stated, “the government compellingly argues that respondents would not suffer irreparable harm” while the grants are paused. The court said it had relied on statements by the challengers that “they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running.”

In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, countered that allowing the grants to be terminated would “inflict significant harm on grantees — a fact that the government barely contests.”

She added: “Worse still, the government does not even deign to defend the lawfulness of its actions.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the teacher training efforts would be harmed by the court’s action.

“States have consistently represented that the loss of these grants will force them — indeed, has already forced them — to curtail teacher training programs,” she wrote.


When the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote in an emergency application that Judge Joun’s order was one of many lower-court rulings thwarting government initiatives.

“The aim is clear: to stop the executive branch in its tracks and prevent the administration from changing direction on hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse that the executive branch considers contrary to the United States’ interests and fiscal health,” she wrote.

She added: “Only this court can right the ship — and the time to do so is now.”

In response, the states said that the justices should decide one dispute at a time.

The brief added that the cancellation of the grants had not been accompanied by reasoning specific to each grant. The boilerplate letters, it said, “did not explain how the grant-funded programs engaged in any of the purportedly disqualifying activities.”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

 

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting. More about Abbie VanSickle

 
A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2025, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Let Trump Halt Teacher-Training Funds. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

See more on: U.S. Supreme Court, Education Department (US), U.S. Politics, Donald Trump

The Vicious and Debilitating All Out Assault On Education, Literacy, Social and Economic Justice, Truth, and Free Speech Under the U.S. Fascist Regime and Political Psychosis of the GOP, MAGA, and the Utterly Tyrannical Scumbag-in-Chief: PART 2

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/trump-ice-detentions.html

Opinion

Panelists:  David French, M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen and Zeynep Tufekci

‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America.
April 4, 2025
New York Times

 

Credit:  Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by David Dee Delgado, Andrew Harnik, and HERIKA MARTINEZ/Getty

Listen to this article · 30:59 minutes

Learn more


By David French, M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen and Zeynep Tufekci

[Mr. French, Mx. Gessen, Ms. Polgreen and Ms. Tufekci are Opinion columnists.]


​Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with four Times Opinion columnists about how President Trump is changing America.

Patrick Healy: Masha, David, Lydia, Zeynep, I’ll be blunt — I never thought our country would have masked federal agents snatching students off sidewalks seemingly because of newspaper opinion pieces they wrote or protest movements they helped lead. As I was walking on my own sidewalk the other night, I played out the tape and imagined where these detentions and tactics might lead. Would a day come in America when conversations like this one are not permitted by the state? What if my country won’t always be what I think it is? I thought that Donald Trump was likely to win last November, and that a backlash was coming over progressive activism, illegal immigration, free speech and more. But I did not expect — as Masha wrote powerfully in their column this week — the forced deportation of people in the U.S. legally and the growing irrelevance of the law. So play out the tape with me: What is our country becoming?

M. Gessen: I want to try to be precise here. The future is not preordained. We can observe today’s events and the direction in which things are moving, but we cannot predict the future. That said, is it possible that conversations like this one will one day be banned by the state? Yes, it is. Will this happen? It depends. Are we closer to such an outcome than we were three months ago, two weeks ago, yesterday? Without a doubt. How do we know? For one thing, political speech is already becoming impossible for a rapidly growing number of people. This country has always severely restricted the political rights of immigrants, including green-card holders. Now political speech by college professors and students has become risky, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status.

Healy: There’s only one correct side in the eyes of the American government today — President Trump’s side.

Gessen: When universities and individual researchers lose funding because the White House doesn’t like their academic policies or because their grant applications include words like “diversity” (even if it’s “genetic diversity”), we have entered a period when the speech space is rapidly shrinking.

David French: We’re becoming an earlier version of ourselves. Nothing we’re seeing is truly new. Too many people forget the thousands of people prosecuted during the Woodrow Wilson administration for protesting American involvement in World War I, or the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, much less the experience of Black Americans for centuries. The list of American injustices is long.

Thankfully, we’re not yet facing crises that grave, but America has always been at war with its darker nature, and sometimes that darker nature wins. We are living in a period of profound national regression.

Lydia Polgreen: I had the surreal experience of watching the video of Rumeysa Ozturk being snatched off the streets near Tufts while I was in Damascus, Syria. I was there on a reporting trip for my series on global migration, and my notebook was already filled with stories of arbitrary detention by faceless agents of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. This was an omnipresent fear for millions of Syrians during the Syrian civil war who were suspected of disloyalty by the regime.

So it was striking how small an impression this video made on people I spoke to the next day. It depicted a woman in a hijab, being grabbed by a male agent while on her way to break the Ramadan fast. Of course Syria is in the midst of its own struggle to rebuild after the fall of the Assad regime, but I was struck by how irrelevant, even puny, the United States seemed to Syrians.


Healy: What did you take away from that, Lydia?

Polgreen: It’s useful to see your own country through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference. The question, it seemed, was less what the United States is becoming, than whether Americans realize what it already is.

French: I also think it’s useful to consider what we’d think if we saw this same behavior in a foreign democracy. If a man who instigated an attack on, say, a parliament building to preserve his hold on power was able to hold office again and then immediately not only began pardoning the loyal militia that attacked the government but also denied due process and free speech rights to his political opponents, we’d consider that nation to be in the midst of an autocratic takeover.

Zeynep Tufekci: Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by people wearing masks who stuffed her into a car. It was such a revelatory moment. There is no credible claim that she broke any laws. It’s a clear example of how lines shift under one’s feet, like quicksand. A year ago, the very people who are now cheering on her treatment might have said newspaper opinion pieces were fine as freedom of speech. Free speech was fine until it wasn’t. Protests were fine until they weren’t.

Healy: Masha, you wrote this week that an American police state has arrived. I want to take the other side of that. America just had a member of the opposition party speak unmolested in the U.S. Senate for more than 25 hours. The liberal candidate won handily in a big state election in Wisconsin. A free press published your column — and has published columns by all of you — challenging Trump and the administration. I am not saying the contours of a police state or authoritarian state are not emerging; I graduated from Tufts, and the video of the Tufts student was like a scene out of a totalitarian state. But isn’t civil society still robust and free in America in most ways? Or is that an illusion, a rationalization?

Gessen: I think it’s a mistake — a very tempting mistake to make — to take stock by looking at what we still have rather than what we have already lost. Two and a half months has not been enough time for Trump to quash every single opposition voice, dismantle the electoral system, successfully intimidate every single judge and bring every single publication to heel. Is that good? Of course. But there is no way he could have done all of that in less than three months. He has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage, and I think damage is the more meaningful metric right now.

Healy: Masha, you’re making me think of your recent column on whether to obey or not obey Trump and the way pragmatism factors into that calculus. I think a lot of people — myself included — look more at what we still have than what we’ve lost — partly to avoid sliding into grievance and resentment over those losses. But I see the dangers you describe. As a citizen, our country is becoming less recognizable, especially on matters of “liberty and justice for all.”

Gessen: Patrick, I think one of our best and worst traits as humans is the ability to adapt to what we have. Living under the Putin regime for many years (and observing my friends living there for much longer), I got used to a sort of a shock-and-lull cadence. There would be a terrifying new law or a wave of arrests or the invasion of a neighboring country — and people who were opposed to Vladimir Putin would collectively gasp, talk about how unthinkable this was and how they may need to leave the country. A bit later, we’d breathe out, take stock and think, “Well, I can still do meaningful work, live in community with my friends, look forward to a few things — this is not the end of the world.” And, of course, it’s never the end of the world (until it is), but I think our adaptability plays tricks on us. We don’t notice how, as individuals and a society, we lose more and more freedom to act and think.

Back when I was living in Russia, I would regularly try to leave the country and go to Ukraine or Sweden or the United States, to remind myself what it actually felt like to live in a free society. Maybe we should all develop the habit of taking regular breathers in Canada, the better to take stock of our actual situation.

French: I sometimes think people argue so much over political or legal terms, such as “police state” or “constitutional crisis,” that we distract ourselves from focusing on the terrible facts of the injustice that’s taking place right in front of our face. I think Masha’s arguments about a police state are extremely compelling, but no one has to agree to use that term to unite with Masha in saying that the administration’s actions are utterly appalling, deeply unjust and profoundly dangerous.

The question I ask myself isn’t, “do we have a police state?” but rather, “Is there a line Trump won’t cross?” In other words, is there any self-restraint at all? And if the answer is no (as I think it is), then we have to realize that the only things preventing America from sliding into violent despotism are the courage of Trump’s opponents and the strength of those institutions that are willing to take a stand.

Polgreen: I remember a conversation I had with Masha in the first days of this Trump administration. I invoked the hell Republicans would likely pay in the midterms, and Masha said something to the effect of, if there are midterms. I am on record as being deeply averse to catastrophic thinking, though definitely not immune to panic. And I now feel pretty chastened by my own blithe, if limited, optimism. I just did not have the capacity in those first weeks to imagine how bad it could get.

Healy: And now?

Polgreen: Seeing the broad capitulation of institutions and individuals has left me thinking much more as Masha does here. Every inch given is a permission slip to push a little further next time. Every failure of solidarity is a crack with which to wedge the foes of autocracy a little further apart. Bargaining makes fundamental rights seem negotiable, and negotiations are what Trump wants. Anything less than total refusal feels wholly inadequate.

Healy: David, I want to get your views as a lawyer about the creeping criminalization of free speech. We are seeing it around university campuses and around not only pro-Palestinian action but of pro-Palestinian thought. You had Johns Hopkins tell faculty and staff members not to get in the way of ICE detentions. You have the various agreements being made with Trump by Columbia University and, perhaps, Harvard soon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats overseas to scrutinize social media content of some visa applicants for evidence of criticizing America and Israel. As an Opinion colleague mentioned the other day, screening for criticism of the U.S. is chilling — but it’s remarkable to screen for criticism of another country.

French: The atmosphere for free speech in this country is the worst it’s been since the Red Scare. This might sound strange, but I’m actually more alarmed by the capitulation of so many powerful legal and academic institutions than I am by Trump’s unconstitutional demands.

Healy: Say more about that — because I know, as a lawyer, you are concerned about the unconstitutional demands!


French: So, between the 1950s and 1970s, American courts developed a series of very robust legal doctrines designed to protect free speech — partly as a result of the Red Scare, but also because of efforts to suppress the civil rights movement. If NATO is the geopolitical version of saying “never again” to invasion and genocide, then First Amendment jurisprudence is the American version of saying “never again” to the censorship and tyranny of the past.

But to rely on the First Amendment, you have to have the courage to go to court, to sue the administration, to secure court rulings and then make the president defy the Supreme Court if he wants to continue his campaign of censorship. Of course he could do just that, but Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps are making Trump’s work easier — and his opponents’ work harder — by throwing in the towel before they even attempt to appeal to a legal system that should be built for exactly this moment.

Tufekci: Notice the many intellectuals and Silicon Valley folks who complained about the stifling of free speech before this year, and note how many of them are now completely silent or even cheering what’s going on with the apparent criminalization of campus speech. There are a few principled people who have spoken out, thankfully, but I find myself constantly shaking my head at so much silence. I also agree with David that the unprincipled capitulation is more important and worrying than any single attack.

Healy: I want to bear down on the belief among some Americans about the growing irrelevance of the law, judges and lawyers. A colleague noted how Trump allies apparently managed to get Andrew Tate out of Romania (and into Florida) — but now they are powerless against the “foreign sovereign” El Salvador to help a man they accidentally deported there. David wrote recently about how Trump has not intimidated the courts so far. But I keep wondering if Americans will still have faith in the rule of law when the Trump administration keeps applying or interpreting it however it likes.

Gessen: That’s such a good point, about Andrew Tate and Romania versus the man deported to El Salvador. For the record, while it’s very important to tell the stories of individuals subjected to injustice, it makes me uncomfortable when we focus on the man who had protected status, or the Venezuelan gay makeup artist, or the young barber, who were on those planes to El Salvador — when in fact every single man who was on those planes was put there without due process and is now confined to a prison, indefinitely. This well-observed contrast between the fates of two different men in foreign prisons points to another way in which Trump is transforming power. By sidelining the courts on the one hand and decimating the federal bureaucracy on the other, Trump is concentrating power in an extreme way.

Putin holds an annual televised hotline during which a person might ask him to fix a leaking roof in a school building or intervene in a salary dispute — trying to totally normalize the idea that one person wields all the power and nothing can function without him.

I think this is how Trump understands power, too. It’s true that Trump has not intimidated the courts so far. But his administration seems to be consistently ignoring court rulings, whether on deportations, or on the trans-people-in-the-military ban, or on funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. By word and deed, Trump is showing it’s always up to him.

French: I’m so glad Masha said that. Violations of due process are not unjust only when inflicted on the innocent. The Fifth and 14th Amendment due process protections apply to any “person” in the United States, not just to citizens or certainly not just to the innocent. Indeed, due process is how we try to discern guilt or innocence. Like Masha, I fear that by focusing on the terrible individual injustices, we might (perversely enough) send the message that a due process violation is only a problem when it inflicts harm on the innocent. Due process is a fundamental human right.

Tufekci: Patrick, rule of law isn’t something that happens in a vacuum. Currently, judges are constantly being targeted by name and face as well as through their family members. Elon Musk has posted the name and photo of the daughter of a judge who ruled against something the administration wanted to do, even though it was a temporary injunction to stop them from doing something until higher courts stepped in. And that’s not the only example of a judge or a judge’s family being targeted like that. Institutions are made of people, too. People who keep thinking courts will surely put a stop to the excesses have to remember that courts are run by vulnerable human beings who are also subject to pressure and targeting.

Healy: So, how does everything we’re talking about differ from the architecture of the war on terror? I think a bit of compare-and-contrast would be helpful here. I was a war reporter in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East in the early 2000s, and returned to the United States of the Patriot Act, enhanced interrogation tactics and Guantánamo Bay.


French: When I think of the present moment compared to the early 2000s, it’s as if the Trump administration is experiencing greater political hysteria, with far less cause.

The Trump administration is acting as if America faces a threat to its existence — but from immigrants, Democrats and Canadians, and not from a powerful and heavily armed terrorist group that just inflicted catastrophic damage in the heart of two of America’s great cities.

Also, while there were obvious excesses and outrages in our response to Al Qaeda (or during our invasion of Iraq), the legal issues surrounding our counterinsurgency operations were infinitely more complex than the simple legal norms that Trump is defying today. It is not easy to fight an enemy that deliberately and systematically violates the law of war, and we often faced rather novel legal issues created when an army confronts unlawful, un-uniformed enemy combatants.

But we learned. We improved. During my deployment in Iraq, my unit provided suspected Qaeda insurgents with more humane treatment and due process than the Trump administration is providing to some visa holders who write pro-Palestinian op-eds. It’s a farce.

Gessen: There are always different stories one can tell about any given political moment, but the story that is relevant to me goes back to the American response to 9/11. The police infrastructure that is now deployed against immigrants was created then. But it’s a lot more than that: It’s the story of America that was forged in the wake of 9/11 — the story of a country under siege, cowering and baring its teeth against a hostile world. That was an insane story to tell about the most powerful country in the world, and it is the story that Trump is now telling about all of his policies, from the crackdown on immigrants to tariffs.

Tufekci: Masha is right — some of the machinery for the current erosion of rights came to being after 9/11, and was upheld and even expanded by both Republicans and Democrats. This is why it’s so important to defend fundamental rights on principle. It’s always good for people to imagine a tool in the hands of someone that doesn’t like them before deciding it’s a great tool simply because they happen to like who wields it at the moment.

Healy: Lydia, when you have an opposition effort that comes to life — Cory Booker’s marathon speech, the Bernie Sanders-A.O.C. rallies around the country, the “Hands Off!” protests this weekend, even the plunging stock market, which is its own form of opposition from the business world — what does that tell us? Is that real and consequential opposition, or is it a kind of performance of opposition and resistance that doesn’t have any real impact on Trump and his administration?

Polgreen: There is clearly a hunger to manifest in the physical world the anger and betrayal many Americans are feeling, and I am glad that some Democrats are waking up and showing up to give a venue and bring some focus to that anger. Booker’s speech is a welcome intervention, as is the move to put holds on nominees in the Senate. But I have to wonder — what took so long?

That said, I think the disgust at the Democrats, reflected in abysmal polling, is a bit of a red herring. Just look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which was won in a blowout by the Democrat-aligned candidate. Or the thinning margins in deep red Florida house races. The decision not to put Elise Stefanik’s House seat in a strong Republican district into play tells you a lot about how the White House thinks this is going.

But there is also polling that shows that Trump remains consistently high, at just about 50 percent, on immigration. Of course, much depends on how you ask the question. When asked about specific practices, like the one that sent a gay makeup artist to a gruesome prison in El Salvador with no due process, people naturally say they are against that kind of thing. But revulsion to a sympathetic individual story elides the broader point. Immigration seems to be the place where the greatest cruelty and crudeness is on display, and he has continued to enjoy relatively high support on the issue, which tells you something about where Americans stand.


Healy: Trump talked a lot in his first term about roughing up protesters, “shooting” looters, and allegedly privately asked about shooting protesters in the legs. Will we get there? We already have, at Kent State in 1970, and Nixon then won easily in 1972. But what I’m asking is: are the conditions being laid for violence by the state against its citizens, or is that hyperbolic, alarmist?

Polgreen: I have been deeply worried since Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as secretary of defense about the wanton use of military violence against civilians in the United States. His lobbying on behalf of soldiers convicted or accused of heinous crimes against civilians is pretty chilling, especially because it represents a big shift in his views over time. I don’t find it hard to imagine him sending soldiers to shoot civilians if Trump orders it. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, absurdly, against a Venezuelan gang. There is no reason to think Trump would hesitate to use his extraordinary powers to deploy the U.S. military on American soil to put down protests he doesn’t like, and even less reason to think Hegseth would refuse him.

And even before you get to the extreme point of using U.S. troops, you already have agents from ICE willing to engage in what seem to be totally lawless arrests. One might have once taken comfort in the possibility that the police, members of state National Guards and other armed agents would exercise restraint when faced with unarmed protest. Not so much anymore.

Gessen: It’s already happening, and it happened during Trump’s first term. During the Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, we saw violence, some of it extreme, deployed against protesters. I am thinking, in particular, about Portland, Ore., where, in addition to the physical violence, protesters or people suspected of going to or from a protest were reportedly getting snatched up off the street. Why am I bringing this up now? Because the force deployed in Portland five years ago was the Department of Homeland Security, the militarized outfit that is not subject to the constraints imposed on the military acting domestically. I have argued that the D.H.S. was destined to become our secret police — and now, with ICE raids and detentions, we see exactly how it functions.

The distinction implied in your question, Patrick, is between noncitizens and citizens. But, in just a couple of weeks, we have seen the focus of ICE raids expand from people who are in this country without legal status to legal permanent residents. At this rate, in a couple of weeks naturalized citizens will be seen as a legitimate target (this was already done in the first Trump administration), as will be the children of immigrants (see the executive order repealing birthright citizenship). Other categories of citizens will follow. And, as I noted, D.H.S. has already been deployed against citizens who were protesting.

French: I keep going back to the argument Trump supporters made time and again in 2016. They take him “seriously, not literally.” So when he talked about shooting protesters or immigrants, they interpreted him as saying, “We need law and order and a secure border, and I really mean it.”

But Jan. 6 should have ended that nonsense. He always wanted to be taken seriously and literally, but key members of his first-term administration threw their bodies in front of his worst plans. When they were gone, Trump was unleashed, and now he’s surrounded by sycophants and fanatics. Trump has no line, and neither do the key members of his team.

Polgreen: I’m glad Masha brought up the special role of D.H.S, because it brings us back to 9/11. I remember the first time I heard the name “Department of Homeland Security” it made my skin crawl. It felt like such an un-American name — vague, capacious, full of trouble. The perfect vessel for an authoritarian project.

Tufekci: We should take politicians seriously and literally. If people talk themselves into complacency, we should expect exactly the result that complacency will bring.

Healy: So, what are the danger signs for America that have not happened but that we should be watching for? What are the forms of intimidation that do not involve unmarked vans and arrests and detentions?


Gessen: This may come across as an infuriatingly soft answer, but I believe it’s the most important thing. I think of it as intellectual drift. Consider ideas that seemed beyond the pale to you a few years ago that you may now think twice about questioning in the company of people you don’t know very well. It may be something like the border wall. Remember 2016, when Trump’s incessant “build the wall” served as a sort of shorthand for his belligerent, fear-mongering politics? It seems mild now, not just because he has said many more outrageous things, but also because the need for extreme border security has become a pretty mainstream idea. Now think about things that seem insane now. Invading Canada or Greenland? Taking possession of the Gaza Strip and expelling Palestinians (a pretty mainstream idea in Israel already)? Claiming that trans people don’t exist (but, despite our nonexistence, are very dangerous)?

Healy: Aligning with Putin and saying it’s the president of Ukraine who’s a dictator.

Gessen: Exactly. When you find yourself looking around the room before saying that Russia started a war of aggression against a democratic country, you know we are deep in the territory of autocratic intellectual drift. (I know you asked about forms of intimidation — I think intimidation is at work in this kind of intellectual drift, but it’s the intimidation in the ether rather than in physical form.)

Polgreen: I am examining my own responses to government action very carefully, because what we guard against is a sign of what we allow to come into the realm of possibility. A couple of weeks ago I idly wondered if I should start carrying my passport around with me. My ethnicity is ambiguous, and I thought, well, it would be a big hassle if I was detained by ICE for some reason. And I pretty quickly decided that I would not do this — though I don’t begrudge anyone making a different choice. It felt like a surrender, and seeing powerful institutions surrender one after another, I could not countenance doing the same myself. It is a small thing, but I do think it will be up to individuals and smaller institutions to make these refusals and bear the consequences for the full horror of what is happening to become visible.

Tufekci: I’m an academic so I’m all about reading history books. But when it comes to now, I keep feeling there is too much meta-analysis — what will happen in the future and what exact line could be crossed as a sign of what’s to come — rather than a strong, singular focus on recognizing what’s happening and figuring out what needs to be done, now, this moment, in order to protect fundamental rights from further erosion and crucial institutions from hard-to-reverse destruction.

French: It’s not each new Trump action that alarms me nearly as much as each new capitulation. Each new capitulation hurts America more than each new executive order or unconstitutional mandate. We have the legal and institutional tools to deal with a man like Donald Trump, but it takes courage and will to use those tools.


But for the invertebrates of the American right — including members of the Republican establishment who loathe Trump behind closed doors and rally to his defense on Fox News — Trump would already be gone, impeached and convicted in 2019 and remembered in history as weak and ineffectual man who challenged a constitutional republic, and failed.

Healy: I want to finish with an open-ended question. Is there anything on your mind — or troubling you — that you want to bring up or return to?

Polgreen: Nothing is inevitable, and no process is unstoppable. This goes multiple ways. A failure to imagine how much our system of government relied on what turned out to be extremely soft norms got us to this point. The tools that have preserved and expanded democracy in the past — the courts, elections, the free press, universities — may be weaker than we thought. But failing to imagine that Americans do have the power to resist and obstruct, or to think that because powerful institutions are capitulating that smaller, weaker ones don’t stand a chance is to make a fatal error. Trump and his allies want us to believe that they cannot be stopped, but they are lying.

Tufekci: I will echo Lydia. The future is not set in stone, and a wake-up call should be a call to action. There’s no requirement for people to agree on everything else to come together to defend fundamental rights and liberties — especially free speech, due process and the rule of law — and basic principles like checks and balances. I know the saying about the moral arc of the universe and how it bends toward justice. As nice a quote as that is, it’s not something that just happens. The arc only bends toward justice if people are willing to take risks and work hard to bend it in that direction.

Gessen: Lydia, I’m glad you brought up the failure of the imagination. The things we are experiencing — a profound destabilization of the political and economic order, the introduction of political terror (for this is what a secret police does) — put us in a state of anxiety that’s terrible for the imagination. It’s hard to imagine the worst or the best when it takes all you have to put one foot in front of the other. And yet, to prevent the worst, we have to be able to imagine not only ways to resist Trump but a future for this country that makes this resistance necessary.


French: I often think about the letter John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798. “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” he wrote, “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Another way of putting it is that character is destiny. We can create checks and balances. We can establish constitutional doctrines. But if the people who defend those doctrines abandon their posts, then we are lost.
From the comments section (NYT)

 
R
Ratan
NJ
April 4

Even now, Republicans get some resistance only because the economy is going down. If economy is doing good, no one will bother about human rights violations or the hit on the Constitution itself. In fact, millions of voters would cheer them up.


David French
Opinion Columnist
April 4


@Ratan I think this is one of the central insights of the moment. Sadly, a critical mass of the American people have a very high tolerance for corruption and even oppression so long as their personal circumstances are good. That’s a key reason why arguments about the rule of law or democracy didn’t resonate with so many millions of Americans. They may not exactly like or approve of Jan. 6, but they didn’t feel its impact in their lives. I think we’re learning the extent to which the success of the American experiment has always depended on the honor system — on a political class that wasn’t willing to fully exploit public passion and was willing to voluntarily constrain its worst impulses by (however imperfectly) maintaining basic respect for the truth and the constitutional order.