He's not just "whitewashing" museums. It's a full-on project of white racial erasure [View all]

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Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian is a crime against history
He's not just "whitewashing" museums. It's a full-on project of white racial erasure

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published August 26, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) In his landmark essay “The Souls of White Folk” published in 1910, W.E.B. Du Bois eerily previewed President Donald Trump’s appeal and rise to power. “This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts,” he wrote. “How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream.”

Forty-six of our 47 presidents have been white. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump is America’s first White president. His power in that role is growing; it is inseparable from his authoritarian revolutionary project to remake American society in the image of his MAGA movement. With each passing day of his second term in office, Trump is growing even more bold and confident in his plans to rewrite the nation’s history, public memory and reality to fit his obscene vision.

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Some of the art singled out by Trump as being “unpatriotic” and “woke” included Rigoberto A. González’s 2022 painting “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas,” a portrait of a Black transgender Statue of Liberty by Amy Sherald, a drawing of brown migrants watching Fourth of July fireworks from the other side of the wall in Mexico and a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty where Lady Liberty is holding tomatoes — ostensibly to throw in protest — instead of a torch.

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We are witnessing a thought-crime regime that is taking control of the country’s intellectual history and collective memory, which have been deemed “woke.” This includes higher education, with a particular focus on elite colleges and universities; rewriting history textbooks and other educational materials; destroying public media such as PBS and NPR; restoring Confederate monuments; removing the historical context of public parks and other spaces and their connections to the color line; cutting federal funding for scientific and health research that benefits marginalized communities, including women; and ordering the Pentagon to purge officers and other leaders who are not white men, and remove the names and contributions of African-American and other nonwhite veterans — as well as women and LGBTQ Americans — from its libraries, website, reference materials, bases and ships. ...........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/26/trumps-assault-on-the-smithsonian-is-intellectual-violence/