Last week we reported that as part of “Whitewashing” the premier network of U.S. museums—the Smithsonian—to “delete” the actual history of savage oppression and righteous resistance in the U.S., the White House had ordered a “comprehensive internal review” of eight of its DC museums to make sure they were in “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.” 

Then without even waiting for this “review,” the White House issued a lengthy tirade: “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian” that lists and condemns dozens of examples of what the fascists hate about these museums. And Trump ranted on his social media about how the Smithsonian and other museums only talk about “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”

Here are just a few examples of what these fascists aim to delete:

• “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas,” by Rigoberto A. González, which richly captures the humanity, hope, fear of a family seeking a better future.
• Ayana Jackson’s “From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya”—a work memorializing “the children of pregnant women who had been thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage.”
• An exhibit at the National Museum of the American Latino which points out the indisputable facts that the “Texas Revolution” in 1836 was a “massive defense of slavery waged by ‘white Anglo Saxon’ settlers against anti-slavery Mexicans fighting for freedom, not a Texan war of independence from Mexico,” and that the “Mexican-American War” (1846-48) was an unprovoked “North American invasion,” motivated by pro-slavery politicians. Also on the “Don’t You Dare Say That” list are these words engraved on a pillar: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”

• Amy Sherald’s “Trans Forming Liberty,” depicting the Statue of Liberty as a transgender woman. (Note: Sherald was scheduled for a solo showing at the National Portrait Gallery, the first by a modern Black artist, a great honor as well as a big career boost. When told that the museum might pull “Trans Forming Liberty,” Sherald courageously canceled her entire show.)

Again, this is just a small sampling. The White House also attacked an animated examination of the life of Dr. Anthony Fauci, an exhibit that described the European settling of North America as “colonization,” and an exhibit that pointed out the truth that founding father Benjamin Franklin was a slaveowner.

Imagine a society in which the massive power of the government is brought to bear to stamp out these facts and ideas, these works of art! In which the only permissible narrative is the fairy tale about “American Greatness,” in which the genocide of millions of Native people, the enslavement of millions of Black people, the humanity of immigrants cannot even be discussed publicly.

The only reason for imposing this wall of lies is in order to perpetuate and escalate these same oppressive relations. Historians and other academics inspired by the Civil Rights and Black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s had to really struggle to unearth the truth which had been buried, which further encouraged popular resistance to oppression. Now MAGA is working furiously to ban and re-bury this hard-won understanding of reality, as as part of crippling people’s ability to stand up and fight against MAGA’s escalating attacks on oppressed people.

NO ONE—no historian, writer or artist—should go along with this. Even more: there needs to be mass defiance from within the institutions themselves—refusing to take down artwork and refusing to rewrite history. To go along with this whitewash and erasure would be to capitulate to and to collaborate with fascism!