Why Trump's Smithsonian executive order is especially painful
The blood spilled by our ancestors for voting rights, fair housing and other freedoms has benefitted non-Black Americans arguably more than they have benefitted us.
By Shalise Manza Young
President Donald Trump has been signing executive orders at the pace of a teenager posting to Snapchat, and, for the most part, they are press releases that further expose his administration’s cruelty, grift, and ignorance, or some combination of the three. For the most part, they aren’t as deserving of the attention they are given, particularly as there is real damage being done in so many areas.
But something about last week’s order concerning the “divisive race-centered ideology” at many of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, specifically singling out the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the National American Women’s Museum—which exists only online—feels like a lot more than an empty edict Trump will forget about by his next tee time: for one thing, he put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the effort, and, for another, the abiding principle of this administration and its bumbling band of incompetents is anti-Black racism and bigotry against queer people. Even if not much changes, the executive order is ominous and objectionable.
“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” the executive order reads in part, and directs Vance, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents along with members of Congress and other citizens, to threaten funding for exhibits that they believe “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”
That’s why Black people across social media have been sounding the alarm about this. The NMAAHC, which opened in 2016, has been a mecca of sorts, so popular among not just the people whose journey it centers but millions of others that, for its first couple of years, the wait to get passes was weeks, not days.
The museum charts the journey of Black people from the harrowing days of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery to the fights for Civil Rights and the numerous contributions of African Americans in sports, music, the arts, and beyond. Affectionately known as the “Blacksonian,” it tells the unvarnished truth – terrible and triumphant.
Which is precisely why Trump and, more likely, his in-house Goebbels, Stephen Miller, want to whitewash it. To them, any attention on the Black experience and Black people generally that isn’t “look at the murder rate in Chicago!” must be exorcised.
To them, the beauty, resilience, and brilliance of Black people must be kept as a myth, lest anyone realize that the wholly mediocre and manifestly unqualified white men that have been elevated to positions of power in this administration (looking at you, Pete Hegseth) are not, in fact, worthy or special simply because they are white men.
Black history is American history, period. Our ancestors built this country, for free, under constant threat of violence. Southern states and those who owned enslaved people were so devoted to the institution that they became traitors to preserve it. Losing traitors, but traitors nonetheless. The blood spilled by our ancestors for voting rights and fair housing and myriad other freedoms has benefitted non-Black Americans arguably more than they have benefitted us.
It’s not just the pain though. You cannot tell the story of this country without the men of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments, one of them my great-great-great grandfather, Nahum Gardner Hazard, free Black men who fought key battles with the Union in the Civil War. Or the agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. Or Jesse Owens’ dominant performance in front of German dictator Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games. Or the soul of Aretha Franklin, the showmanship of Michael Jackson or the all-around talent of Beyoncé.
Heck, the wooden golf tees Trump uses during his frequent rounds of 18 were the invention of George F. Grant, a dentist who was also the first Black professor at Harvard.
And given that Trump doesn’t want transgender women acknowledged in the Women’s History Museum, Marsha P. Johnson, icon of the gay rights movement, might be erased from that center as well as the NMAAHC.
When Hitler was defeated, Germany passed numerous laws banning Holocaust denial, Nazi imagery, and anti-Semitic speech. When South Africa finally ended apartheid, it rewrote its constitution; the preamble begins: “We, the people of South Africa, recognise the injustices of our past, honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land, respect those who have worked to build and develop our country, and believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”
Those countries acknowledged the sins of their past while making efforts to unify their people moving forward. America has never done that. In fact, quite the opposite —every time there seems to be progress toward racial justice, there is ferocious backlash. The lynchings that kept African American families in terror began during Reconstruction, the brief period of time when this country actually tried living up to its vaunted ideal of all men being created equal. Trump’s rise came in response to President Barack Obama’s eight years in office. The transparently bad-faith “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter” stickers and flags came in response to the pleas that Black lives matter.
The NMAAHC is a testament to the Black experience, the battles won, the abominations survived, the past, and the future. It is but one part of American tale, but it is as necessary as all of the others, whether Trump and Vance and Miller like it or not.
Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
Nothing about this administration is intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, encouraging, useful, inclusive, or enlightening. I can't think of one redeeming quality. Yet most consider themselves Christians. I have never experienced a more hateful destructive group in my 70 years.
The Federalist Society's Leonard Leo became a billionaire by collaborating with Republican legislators and dark money donors to pack our federal courts with extremist judges. The Supreme Court's six-extremist supermajority is his single greatest achievement (even before there were six, John Roberts was able to manipulate five into the piecemeal dismantling of the landmark Voting Rights Act, and the ramming through of Citizens United, which liberated the nation's billionaires to poison the American civic well).
Leo now leads an organization called The Teneo Network (Pro Publica has done some excellent reporting on this appalling group), which is, Leo acknowledges quite openly, even proudly, dedicated to doing to various sectors--notably publishing, journalism, higher education and the arts-- what the Federalist Society has done to our federal courts: to transform them into vessels of a narrow, fanatical ideology, to crush all dissenting voices.
The Republicans aim to create a society in which mere disagreement with the Republican ruling class invites vicious reprisals and retaliation, and in which artistic and scholarly expressions must be preapproved by the censors and regulators of the state.
The attacks on the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and the nation's libraries reflect the authoritarian right's determination to silence all creative opposition to the regime: to silence memory: to silence the arts: to silence history itself.
When you look at the Supreme Court, and realize how thoroughly the world's greatest judicial body was systematically perverted into a rubber-stamp for an authoritarian regime, and when you look at the Republican Party's escalating assault on every institution of civil society that might challenge their dominance and power, you realize Leo's mad vision is not outside the realm of the possible.
We could be within a few years of a bleak, Soviet-style (or Nazi-style, if you prefer) Kultur in which all expressions are molded by the state, and free, creative expression has been driven underground.
This is certainly what Leonard Leo and the billionaires are hoping for.