The Trump White House has declared war on history itself. In an official article published Friday, Aug. 22, on the White House website, the administration blasted the Smithsonian Institution for telling the truth about slavery, systemic racism, and inequality in America. It was not just an attack on museums -- it was an attack on memory, on facts, and on the lives of generations of Black Americans who endured the country's greatest crimes.
The White House mocked exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for daring to explain that America privileges whiteness. It dismissed scholarship on the legacies of slavery in the Texas Revolution, ridiculed art that reckons with the Middle Passage, and condemned programs that document systemic exclusion in immigration and housing. It went further, painting the Smithsonian as "anti-American propaganda" for highlighting the ways colonization, racism, and oppression shaped the very foundations of the nation. What the administration is doing is clear: it is trying to erase the trail of oppression that runs like a scar through U.S. history -- from the whip on enslaved backs, to Jim Crow segregation, to the discriminatory policies that persist today.
Slavery was not just an economic system -- it was a regime of terror. Families were ripped apart, women were violated, men were chained, and entire generations were forced into labor that built the wealth of this nation. When emancipation finally came, Reconstruction briefly promised equality. Black men held office, built schools, and claimed rights once denied. But white supremacy roared back with violence and legal restrictions.
Reconstruction collapsed, and Jim Crow rose in its place. For nearly a century, Jim Crow laws ensured Black Americans could not vote freely, attend equal schools, or live without fear of lynching. The White House's attempt to dismiss museums for teaching about this reality is nothing less than an attempt to silence that history.
When Jim Crow ended, systemic racism mutated. The federal government backed redlining policies that locked Black families out of home ownership, while white families accumulated wealth through suburban expansion. Gentrification decades later uprooted Black communities in cities, pushing families out of neighborhoods they had called home for generations. Then came the war on drugs. Entire communities were criminalized. Harsh sentencing laws and targeted policing filled prisons with Black and brown bodies, devastating families and stripping away economic and political power. The administration now attacking the Smithsonian is the same one that celebrates law-and-order policies that continue this cycle.
The Civil Rights Movement forced America to confront its hypocrisy. Through marches, sit-ins, and court victories, Black Americans dismantled legal segregation. But every gain came with backlash. Today, voter suppression laws, redistricting schemes, and so-called "voter integrity measures" are dressed-up attempts to return to the days when Black voices were excluded. The Smithsonian's exhibits on democracy document this truth. The White House calls it subversive.
The Trump White House's attack on the Smithsonian is not accidental. By branding the truth as "anti-American," the administration seeks to recast America as blameless. The logic is simple: if slavery is just a footnote, if Jim Crow was just the past, if systemic racism never existed, then there is nothing to fix. There is no reason for reparations, no reason for equity, no reason to confront police violence, mass incarceration, or economic injustice. The administration even ridiculed the National Museum of African Art's exhibit inspired by Drexciya, a myth of children born underwater from enslaved women who died in the Middle Passage. Instead of honoring the resilience behind that vision, the White House dismissed it as "fringe".
The attempt to rewrite history is part of a wider campaign. This White House has moved to criminalize protest, weaken civil rights protections, and silence Black leaders. Attacking the Smithsonian is about controlling the narrative -- deciding whose story matters and whose story gets erased. The truth is this: America's history is not just one of freedom and triumph.
It is also one of bondage, violence, exclusion, and systemic theft of opportunity.
To erase that truth is to dishonor every enslaved man, every woman denied her humanity, every family displaced by redlining, every child funneled into mass incarceration. The Smithsonian was created to tell America's story in full. Today, that mission is under direct assault from a White House that has chosen denial over truth. And if the nation accepts this whitewashing, the suffering of millions will not just be forgotten -- it will be erased.