Adm. Michael Gilday was not deterred in his support of Critical Race Theory on a recommended reading list for U.S. sailors, when asked this week at a hearing about CRT’s anti-capitalist positions, opposition to interracial adoption, and anti-White HIV conspiracy theories.
America’s Chief of Naval Operations made his defense of Critical Race Theory during an exchange with Rep. Jim Banks on the merits of an author on his office’s recommended reading list — Ibram X. Kendi, covering both his public remarks and the recommended book titled “How to Be an Anti-Racist.”
“This is a bigger issue than Kendi’s book,” the officer bristled when asked about the author’s stance that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a “White colonizer” for adopting Black children.
“What this is really about is painting the U.S. military, in this case, the U.S. Navy, as weak, as woke, and we’ve had sailors that spent 341 days at sea last year with minimal port visits,” he said of a wave of recent Republican criticisms of the U.S. military.
The admiral told the Indiana Republican that he disagreed with some of Mr. Kendi’s positions but refused to answer when asked whether opposition to interracial adoption is an “extremist” position.
“Sir, I’m not going to answer that question,” Adm. Gilday said during the House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Mr. Kendi’s book appears on the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program (CNO-PRP) reading list. Other books on the list cited as examples of Critical Race Theory include Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Jason Pierceson’s “Sexual Minorities and Politics.”
Similarly, he balked on questions about anti-capitalist sentiment by CRT supporters and their claims that White people created HIV/AIDS.
“I’m not going to sit here and defend cherry-picked quotes from somebody’s book,” the officer said. “I’m not going to do that. … Our strength is in our diversity, and our sailors understand that. … Racism in the U.S. is a very complex issue. What we benefit from is an open discussion about those issues.”
Mr. Kendi, who also serves as director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, previously made headlines by stating during the 2020 election season that any discussion surrounding “legal voters” is “functionally racist.”
The author told his Twitter supporters in November that saying “legal vote” should be lumped with other allegedly racist terms like “illegal alien” and “personal responsibility,” among others.
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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