On March 27, Donald Trump issued yet another executive order, this one entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which ironically accuses the Smithsonian Institution in general, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in particular, of trying to rewrite the history of the United States of America.
According to The Associated Press, this executive order was widely and sharply criticized by several Black civil rights advocates and historians as well as political figures as his own attempt to whitewash and sanitize history.
One of many critics, Morehouse College professor and historian Clarissa Myrick-Harris, told the AP that Trump wants to deny the actual history of the United States of America.
“It seems like we’re headed in the direction where there’s even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed, or that Jim Crow laws and segregation and racial violence against Black communities, Black families, Black individuals even occurred,” Myrick-Harris said.
Ibram X. Kendi, an anti-racist and bestselling author, took it a step further than Myrick-Harris, referring to the sentiments expressed in Trump’s executive order as a “literal attack on Black America itself,” and furthermore, “The Black Smithsonian, as it is affectionately called, is indeed one of the heartbeats of Black America,” and “also one of the heartbeats” of the United States itself.
Trump’s executive order, much like a brief from America First Legal, argues that the country is now subject to a “corrosive…divisive, race-centered ideology,” which has “reconstructed” America “as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
The order also gives Vice President J.D. Vance the power to review all properties, programs, and presentations in order to stop programs that “degrade shared American values” or otherwise “divide Americans based on race,” which in this context can reasonably be inferred to mean anything that paints white people in a negative light, otherwise known as American history.
Kendi pointed to this in an additional comment, referring to a fascist plan to starve out smaller museums, which in a similar fashion to the NMAAHC, focuses on the experiences of Black Americans, museums such as San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama, and the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
“To me, that’s part of the plan, to starve these institutions that are already starving of resources so that the only institutions that are telling America’s history are actually only telling political propaganda,” Kendi said.
According to Robyn Autry, a sociology professor and the director of the Center for Public Life at Wesleyan University and the author of “Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the U.S. and South Africa,” Trump and his administration are engaging in the federal censorship of American history.
As Autry writes in an op-ed for MSNBC, “The threat to museums such as The National Museum of African-American History and Culture is real. But even more sinister is the administration’s rejection of race as a ‘social construct,’ which is nothing short of an expression of a belief in racial purity and white supremacy.”
Autry concluded, “There’s a reason people in Trump’s administration seem more bothered by the idea of equity than diversity or inclusion: They don’t seem to think we’re equal and they’re going after all content that suggests we are. They believe there is a natural order of human beings — a biologically rigid system of race — that puts them at the top. And they want to force our most celebrated historical institutions to back them up.”
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