“There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.”
—Bob Avakian, Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy; also, BAsics 1:1
On March 27, Trump signed an executive order titled: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. It should actually be entitled “Restoring Coverups, Lies and Sanitation to American History—Especially When It Comes to America’s Genocidal History of Slavery, Jim Crow, and the Mass Incarceration of Black People.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Photo: AP
The order targets the National Museum of African American History and Culture (MAAHC) by name, claiming that it is part of a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” The order states, "Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as harmful and oppressive."1
A sketch of how they packed people from Africa onto slave ships. Image: NMAAHC
Actually, the MAAHC—or the “Black Smithsonian”—is an amazing and, in many sections, historically accurate and scientifically rigorous museum. Spend a day there, as I did seven or eight years ago, and you will come away with a living and basically accurate explanation of the role slavery played in the rise of capitalism, and vice-versa. You will get a good grounding in how central slavery was to the economy and culture of the U.S. in its first 90 years. You will also experience in a visceral way the actual horrors of the Middle Passage, in which over a million Africans died in shackles on their voyage to slavery in the Americas. There is much else there to get into, but I have little doubt that this element is a big part of what so offends the diehard white supremacist Trump.
“Making America Great Again” Requires That People Not Know the Truth
The casket of lynching victim, Emmett Till, after it was found by investigators at the cemetery where he had been buried. Photo: AP
A museum spreading such knowledge is a living refutation of Trump’s vicious “Make America Great Again” slogan. On one level and for many of Trump’s followers, that slogan is code for a return to the America of Trump’s childhood, in the 1950s. This was a time when segregation was still enforced both by law and by lynch rope.2 In the north, urban white street mobs (often backed up by police) would “defend their neighborhoods” by vandalizing the house and threatening the children of a lone Black family that may have had “the nerve” to purchase a house near them—and sometimes physically drove the new family out. At other times the segregation was enforced by an unspoken but strict understanding.3
Children and teenagers—white, Black and everyone else—were not just deprived of knowledge; they were systematically fed lies and distortions designed to justify a profoundly unjust and racist society. And this was a crucial part of their conditioning to be “Americans,” and essential to maintaining an oppressive society.
The Struggle for the Truth
The generation that came of age in the 1960s, as part of rising up in struggle against the oppression of Black people, waged at the same time a struggle for the TRUTH. That generation re-examined American history from bottom to top. They fought to know what had led to the horror that they were seeing every day. Some did rigorous and pathbreaking works of historical research to dig much more deeply into the source of the horrors and into the scope and scale of resistance. Much of this work is concentrated and made readily understandable in the powerful exhibits in the Black Smithsonian, which over 1.6 million people a year visit.
The Assault on Historical Memory and Scientific Truth
Members of Company E, Fourth U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, pictured at Fort Lincoln, in Maryland. The regiment, which was organized in Baltimore after the Civil War broke out, lost nearly 300 men. Photo: Library of Congress
Those truths—and just the sheer amount of people exposed to them through popular institutions like the Smithsonian—go right up against the fascist agenda. But for the fascists the need to either wipe this out or to gut the Black Smithsonian into a shell of itself—and that is what they intend to do—actually goes way way deeper than “going back to the past.” This has everything to do with the future. Bob Avakian, writing three years ago in “Racism—White Kids Need to Learn About It,” makes this point in regard to that struggle for historical truth that erupted in the 1960s:
These fascists are determined not to let something like that happen again, in these highly charged times—and instead they are setting out to mold a bunch of mindless white youth into rabid racists (similar to the Hitler Youth in Germany during the rise of the NAZI fascists there in the 1930s).
The attack on the Smithsonian is just one part of this offensive, even if a very important one. To get a sense of where this is going, last week the library at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis purged its library of nearly 400 books to “prepare” for a visit from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.4 The New York Times headline captured it well: “Angelou’s ‘Caged Bird’ Is Out, But Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ Stays” (in the online version, titled “Who’s In and Who’s Out at the Naval Academy’s Library?”). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells Angelou’s story of growing up as a Black girl in the south facing a dehumanizing system of white supremacy and brutal oppression of women. Hitler’s book contains his justification for war and genocide. Get it?
Apparently, historical truth is verboten (or forbidden) for the minds of those being conditioned to lead others to kill and die for America and, perhaps, to “ethnically cleanse” it of “so-called inferior races.” In the same vein, the thoroughly refuted and widely discredited book The Bell Curve—which argues that Black men, and women in general, are “by nature” less intelligent than white men—stayed on the shelves of the Naval Academy… while a book refuting that pseudo-scientific racist bullshit was pulled.
Think about what is being prepared for here.
I’ll close with this, from that same piece by Bob Avakian quoted above:
Shutting down these fascists in their attempt to suppress the truth about this country is a crucial part of defeating this fascism overall. (Emphasis added.)
Things are moving fast—the fascists in power are determined to quickly overwhelm, divide, crush and demoralize all those who would stand up against them.
Every decent person, in rapidly growing numbers, needs to be mobilized, and to mobilize others, quickly becoming millions rising up, united in their determination to bring about a political situation where this regime can no longer remain in power.
Educated to Be Ignorant
A key part of “justifying” such a blatantly unjust set of social relations was enforced ignorance and educational racism. People like me who went to school in America in the 1950s and early ’60s were taught an upside-down version of the country’s history. It wasn’t so much that you were kept in total ignorance, though that was part of it; it is that you were thoroughly and systematically indoctrinated with an upside-down view of history.
The very well-researched and carefully documented book Teaching White Supremacy, by Donald Yacovone, closely examines virtually every history textbook from 1832 to 1964, showing that virtually across the board the books used taught people that:
- The white enslavers of the south treated “their” slaves kindly and that their slaves were not capable of much beyond the simplest and hardest labor and not that America’s great wealth was built on the lashed backs of 12 generations of people condemned to endless work, rape and brutality;
- The Civil War was a needless tragedy of (white northern) brother vs (white southern) brother, the main blame for which rested on the agitation of the abolitionists—and not a righteous war for emancipation in which Black soldiers fought and died out of proportion to their numbers; and
- Reconstruction—the brief period at the end of the Civil War in which Black people secured some political and civil rights and were at times defended by the Union Army—was a disaster and had to be ended by the horrific apartheid social order in the south that came to be known as Jim Crow.
And these are just some of the most blatant lies.
I was continually struck by the fact that many of these authors had been taught to me in high school as the “best of the best” of American historians. Missing from being taught in any school was the distinguished Black historian and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who fought to tell the truth and was, finally, legally persecuted and driven into exile by the U.S. State Department for opposing U.S. war moves in the 1950s.