Source: TomDispatch
by Douglas H White
“Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of ‘improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology’ from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Colonel James H. Harvey, one of the last of the famed Tuskegee airmen of World War II, blamed Trump, saying, ‘I’ll tell him to his face. No problem. I’ll tell him, you’re a racist.’ In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery. Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties were so long suppressed and denied. Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved.” (04/17/25)