Whitewashing the past

National Museum of African American History and Culture

"…The National Museum of African American History and Culture—which, until recently, was run by The New Yorker's poetry editor, Kevin Young—comes in for particularly splenetic denunciation. Trump, in his first term, expressed a modicum of admiration while visiting what is affectionately called the Black Smithsonian. It is a spectacular museum, one that richly represents the story of African American struggle, suffering, and achievement. Daily, adults and schoolkids take in exhibits about chattel slavery and Jim Crow, Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement, and leave with a deeper understanding of American history in all its darkness and its promise. But in a culture war that demands that political opponents be branded, en masse, as "woke revolutionaries," there can be no complexity. And it will be the job, according to the executive order, of Vice-President J. D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian's board, to make matters simple. Vance is charged with leading the effort to remove from the museum what is called, in exquisite Orwellese, "improper ideology."

This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration..."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/at-the-smithsonian-donald-trump-takes-aim-at-history