While Trump & Co. spread stories about dropping Black History ?
It actually is NOT happeneing so fast….
Trump & Co. efforts to rewrite or or even bury America’s past action is NOT gonna happenb without a fight….
Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in Marchdenouncing cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”
But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.
“The most concerning phrase that I’ve seen is ‘improper ideology,’ which sounds so Orwellian,” Ms. Rogers said. She added, “They’re couching everything as ideology, which is already odd, because what we’re talking about at Whitney Plantation is facts.”
The distortions, she said, come from “plantation museums where they do not talk about slavery, where they try to peddle you this idea that enslaved people were happy.”
When news stories claimed last week that the Smithsonian’s African American history museum had begun returning artifacts to comply with the president’s order, the Smithsonian issued a statement saying it would do no such thing….
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Then on Friday, the president’s budget singled out the government’s 400 Years of African American History Commission for elimination, “to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities.”
But almost five years after the murder of George Floyd opened the door for a more public and thorough examination of the nation’s past, Mr. Trump may not be able to fully slam it shut. Historical sites dedicated to Black history, and the visitors still thronging them, will have their say.
“I can’t understand why he’s doing that, trying to remove certain things that happened in history,” said Mr. Burton. He compared the administration’s attempts unfavorably to the paltry Black history education he received as a child and its effect. “It had us thinking that we were unimportant, we were insignificant,” he said. “But we have a rich history.”…
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Quentin Peacock, 47, had brought his family up from North Carolina to visit the museum on a recent day in April. His mind, he said, was brimming with new facts that he learned on his tour, including the friendship between Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He was also heartened that the visitors that day were so racially diverse, underscoring his belief that telling the truth about American history is not inherently “divisive.”
“It’s an African American history museum, but there’s white history in there too,” Mr. Peacock, a Black father, said. People of all races have connections to the history presented, he added, and any attempts to interrupt or challenge its operations would be “hurtful to all cultures, not just ours.”….
image…Larry and Dortha Burton’s visit to the Frederick Douglass Home in Washington, D.C., inspired them to teach others Black history, regardless of the president’s orders. “I don’t think they will hinder or stop anything,” Ms. Burton said, “because we have insight now.”Credit…Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
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