In March of this year, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order, a successor to similar orders, positions itself as an attempt to reverse what it calls “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” The “corrosive ideology” behind this effort apparently attempts to reframe the United States’ legacy as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” The order goes on to specifically name the National Museum of African American History and Culture, among other Smithsonian institutions, as being complicit in “ideological indoctrination” and the peddling of “divisive narratives.”
Talk of “concerted efforts” to cast America as “irredeemably racist and sexist” can be found in several of Trump’s executive orders and several pieces of Republican legislation throughout the country. The Trumpian assault on Black history and its pronounced effects on the Black present, ironically, is the only “concerted effort” of consequence here. Since his first term began in 2016, the President has consistently opted to distort, erase, and rewrite the darker chapters of American history. He has pushed for the replacement of honest education with “patriotic education,” and deliberately misrepresented calls for honest education as evidence of un-American indoctrination.
The agenda laid out in “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” is well underway. The NMAAHC’s director for the last four years, poet Kevin Young, relinquished the role (though he certainly could’ve been nudged in this direction) shortly after the order was signed. Reverend Amos Brown, a civil rights activist and donor to the museum, reported that two artifacts he loaned the museum were returned to him despite his never asking for them. The explanation given by the NMAAHC, which Brown himself called a “flimsy excuse,” concerned worries that the museum’s lighting would affect the condition of the artifacts.
But this is to be expected of a man hellbent on recreating the country in his own image. Let us call his “patriotic” crusades against diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, antiracist protest, and Black history what they are. They are neither wars against indoctrination nor are they defenses of truth and sanity. They are extremely thinly veiled attacks against the moral principles that fueled the Civil Rights Movement, abolition, and, ironically enough, the formation of the nation that Trump pretends to love. Make America Great Again has only ever meant Make America White, Exclusive, and Intolerant Again.
The NMAAHC does not “distort our shared history” as Trump’s untruthful and insane attempt to “Restore Truth and Sanity” claims it does. Black history, like any history, has no political bias. It does not seek to divide or mislead—that is only the work of those trying to erase it.
Trump’s authoritarian desire for control and conformism unignorably shines unignorably brightly in these lies. As countless abolitionists noted in centuries past, a people with no history are a people with nothing at all: nothing to care about, nothing to fight for, nothing to strive toward. This is why Black history is endangered. This is why Black history must be protected.
Featured image/photo by Anthony McKissic on Unsplash.