Trump is whitewashing American history

[marmar]

Trump is whitewashing American history
The death of Viola Fletcher, the last survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, underscores what Trump is attacking

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published December 13, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) Viola Floyd Fletcher passed away on Nov. 24. At 111, she was the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a pogrom and an act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by thousands of white people that took place over the course of two days in the spring of 1921. The white mob killed at least 300 Black people in the prosperous neighborhood of Greenwood, Oklahoma, which was known as the “Black Wall Street,” and destroyed more than 1,200 homes and at least 60 businesses. Machine guns were used; airplanes dropped bombs. Survivors were forced into a concentration camp. In today’s money, the total damages are estimated at up to $200 million.

Black prosperity is a threat, a provocation and a collective narcissistic injury to what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of whiteness.” More than 100 years later, in the post-civil rights era and the Age of Trump, this remains true.

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What Fletcher and others like her represent are threats to Donald Trump, America’s first White president. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has compellingly argued, Trump’s power in this role is not rooted in skin color or phenotype but in white identity politics and making “the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own… (Trump) is the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.”

As part of Trump and his MAGA movement’s revolutionary project to return the country to the 19th century — what he and his messengers have termed “Make America Great Again” — the experiences and legacies of Black and brown people who speak uncomfortable truths about American society, such as Mother Fletcher, are being distorted and/or silenced in service to patriotism, American exceptionalism, white racial innocence and white victimhood. Even more than his first, Trump’s second administration is based on, as Nikole Hannah-Jones explained in the New York Times, “recast[ing] the white majority as the primary victims of systemic racial discrimination — though no evidence, not even self-reporting among white people, shows this to be true.”

The latest example of the MAGA revanchist project centers on attacking the only two federal holidays that honor Black American history. Earlier this week, Trump’s Interior Department announced it was ending free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. Instead, those holidays will be replaced by Trump’s birthday, June 14, which is also Flag Day. The National Park Service, which is overseen by the department, will also begin charging non-U.S. residents more to visit its parks. This is an act of nativism presented semi-politely as “America-first pricing.” ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/13/trump-is-whitewashing-black-american-history/

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. "Donald Trump, America's first White president."

The ghost of Woodrow Wilson disagrees.