The Whitewashing: A Racist Assault on American History and the Smithsonian

6 minutes read time.

A History Written in Blood

Before we can even begin to dissect the grotesque and ignorant pronouncements emanating from the White House, we must first stand in the unvarnished, brutal truth of American history. The United States of America, the nation that declared all men are created equal, was built on a foundation of human bondage so vast and so cruel that its scale is nearly impossible to comprehend. For 246 years, from 1619 to 1865, the institution of chattel slavery was not an unfortunate footnote; it was a central, driving engine of the nation’s economy and the defining feature of its social order.

This was not a benign system of labor. It was a reign of terror. It was the systematic kidnapping of millions of Africans, who were then packed into the disease-ridden holds of slave ships where untold numbers died during the horrific Middle Passage. Those who survived were sold like livestock on auction blocks, stripped of their names, their families, their languages, and their humanity.

The daily reality of slavery was a relentless assault on the human body and spirit. It was the crack of the overseer’s whip, the constant threat of rape and sexual exploitation, the agony of having your children sold away from you, never to be seen again. It was a legal and social system designed to utterly dehumanize a people, to classify them as property, to deny them the right to marry, to read, or to own anything of their own.

The immense wealth of the nation—the cotton fields of the South, the shipping fortunes of the North, the very foundations of American capitalism—was extracted through the unpaid, forced labor of generations of enslaved people. This brutal system culminated in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, a war fought not over abstract principles of states’ rights, but explicitly over the Southern states’ desire to preserve and expand this monstrous institution. To suggest that this history is anything less than a profound and defining tragedy is an act of willful, malicious ignorance.

The Long Shadow of Jim Crow

The end of the Civil War did not end the oppression. The brief, hopeful period of Reconstruction was systematically dismantled, replaced by a new, insidious system of racial control known as Jim Crow. For another century, Black Americans were subjected to a brutal regime of legal segregation, political disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation. They were denied the right to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests, forced into separate and grotesquely unequal schools and public facilities, and trapped in a system of sharecropping that was little more than slavery by another name.

This legal oppression was enforced by a constant campaign of racial terror, carried out by groups like the Ku Klux Klan and often abetted by local law enforcement. Thousands of Black men, women, and children were lynched, their murders often public spectacles designed to enforce the racial hierarchy through fear. Even after the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement dismantled the legal framework of Jim Crow, the legacy of this oppression has persisted in the form of systemic racism that continues to manifest in housing discrimination, police brutality, and vast economic and educational disparities. This is not a “divisive narrative”; it is the undeniable, documented, and lived reality of millions of our fellow citizens.

The Felonious Punk’s Assault on Truth

It is against this backdrop of unassailable historical fact that we must now view the actions of the Felonious Punk and his administration. In a series of social media posts, the President of the United States has declared war on the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s premier complex of museums, for the crime of telling the truth. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” he wrote, “where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

This is one of the most blatantly racist and historically illiterate statements ever issued by an American president. It is a direct, undisguised demand to erase the central tragedy of the American experience, to replace the hard, complex, and often painful story of our nation with a sanitized, jingoistic “fairytale.” Let us be perfectly clear: to complain that a museum is focusing too much on “how bad Slavery was” is to align oneself with the very forces of white supremacy that have sought to deny and diminish Black history for centuries. Any person, any politician, any citizen who supports this endeavor is, by definition, embracing the racism that underpins it. There are no apologetics. There is no middle ground.

This is not just an outburst of presidential pique; it is a coordinated, top-down assault. The White House has launched a formal “comprehensive review” of eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with the explicit goal of bringing them into “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.” This is a direct threat to the curatorial independence and scholarly integrity of these institutions. The threat is backed by financial extortion.

The administration has made it clear it will use the “exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities,” a playbook that, as Reuters reported, involves threatening to cut federal funding to force compliance. This threat is credible; Columbia University recently agreed to a $221 million settlement to end a government probe. The Smithsonian, which receives the majority of its funding from Congress, is uniquely vulnerable to this kind of political blackmail. The chilling effect is already being felt. Kevin Young, the esteemed director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, stepped down this spring amidst the administration’s escalating attacks.

This is the culmination of a long-running project by the Felonious Punk to rewrite American history in his own image, a project rooted in what one analyst called the protection of “white fragility.” His administration has worked to scrub references to Black heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen and Harriet Tubman. He has complained about the Juneteenth holiday and called for the return of Confederate statues.

This is not an “America First” approach; it is a “White History First” approach. The unified response from the American Alliance of Museums and other historical associations, warning of “growing threats of censorship” and an attack on “Freedom of thought and expression,” highlights the stakes. The Felonious Punk is not just attacking a museum; he is attacking the very idea that a nation can be strong enough to confront the darkest chapters of its own past. He is attempting to pull a blanket over our history as he moves to make the United States a country where only one story is allowed to be told.