{"id":301676,"date":"2025-08-25T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=301676"},"modified":"2025-08-22T01:19:01","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T00:19:01","slug":"on-the-smithsonian-and-slavery-trumps-whitewashing-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/08\/on-the-smithsonian-and-slavery-trumps-whitewashing-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"On The Smithsonian and Slavery: Trump\u2019s Whitewashing of History"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0On Tuesday 19 Aug, President Trump attacked the narrative long taught in US schools and documented in museums, about the abhorrent, centuries-long practice of slavery. He focused on The Smithsonian Institution, the world-renowned center of learning and culture based in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

Trump wrote on his social media platform, \u201cThe Smithsonian is OUT<\/span> OF CONTROL<\/span>, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow bad slavery was.\u201d It is simply unbelievable that such a statement could be uttered by a president in 2025. Yes, slavery was bad, President Trump. It was evil and remains a stain on this country. We should never stop talking about it.<\/p>\n

Lonnie G. Bunch III<\/span> is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, overseeing the entire institution. Prior to that, he was the co-founder of the Smithsonian\u2019s internationally renowned National Museum of African American History and Culture.<\/p>\n

Democracy Now! interviewed Bunch in February, 2020, just before the pandemic struck. Bunch described the importance of depicting slavery:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the most important things for me was to talk about the slave trade\u2026I felt that we had to find real remnants of a slave ship,\u201d Bunch said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found the S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9. It was a ship that left Lisbon in 1794, went all the way to Mozambique and picked up 512 people from the Makua tribe, was on its way back to the New World when it sank off the coast of Cape Town. Half of the people were lost. The other half were rescued and sold the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bunch recalled Trump\u2019s visit to the African American Museum in 2017, at the beginning of his first term as president:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first place Donald Trump visited in an official capacity was the museum. I think he was stunned by the stories we told, and there was so much he didn\u2019t know,\u201d Bunch said. \u201cWhat I realized is that if people who didn\u2019t know but had political influence could come through the museum, I could help them understand, hopefully, something that would change the way they did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Trump\u2019s new assault on The Smithsonian, it seems his visit to the African-American Museum didn\u2019t have Lonnie Bunch\u2019s hoped-for uplifting impact.<\/p>\n

In late March of this year, Trump issued an executive order targeting the museum conplex. The order alleges that \u201cthe Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.\u201d The order further creates a committee to review the contents of exhibits for \u201cimproper ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has set the tone, normalizing the rejection of history, of the indescribable horror of slavery in the United States. His loyalists follow suit.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promoted a revision to the state\u2019s school curriculum, to include instruction on \u201chow slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their own personal benefit.\u201d DeSantis defended the offensive guidelines, saying \u201cI think that they\u2019re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith, into doing things later in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently joined a growing Christian Nationalist congregation. The church\u2019s co-founder, Doug Wilson, has written that slavery \u201cproduced in the South a genuine affection between the races.\u201d Hegseth has ordered that previously removed statues of Confederate officers be put back, and is restoring Confederate names to military installations that had been recently removed.<\/p>\n

The National Park Service has announced that the only outdoor statue in Washington, DC honoring a Confederate, Albert Pike, which was removed following the racial justice protests of 2020, will be restored. Pike was a Confederate general and alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n

And as Trump has successfully defunded public broadcasting, some are advocating that PBS<\/span> content be replaced with material from the rightwing media company PragerU. In one clip from Prager already being used in 10 states, an animated cartoon Christopher Columbus is shown downplaying slavery:<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?\u201d<\/p>\n

Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of history at Harvard University, president of the Organization of American Historians and Pulitzer award-winning author, said on Democracy Now!, \u201cIt\u2019s an attempt to play down or downplay what happened in the United States with slavery\u2026This is a whitewashing of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Trump\u2019s all out assault on truth, learning, and the institutions that preserve and curate our collective history, places like The Smithsonian Institution are more important than ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the era of Donald Trump,\u201d Bunch concluded in 2020, \u201cthe museum has become a pilgrimage site, a site of resistance, a site of remembering what America could be, and a site to engage new generations to recognize they have an obligation to make a country live up to its stated ideals.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Aug 2025\u00a0–\u00a0On Tue 19 Aug, Trump attacked the narrative taught in US schools and documented in museums about the abhorrent, centuries-long practice of slavery, focusing on The Smithsonian Institution, the world-renowned center of learning and culture based in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":173624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[2919,647,249,70],"class_list":["post-301676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-ignorance","tag-slavery","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301677,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301676\/revisions\/301677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}