“Restoring Truth” or Rewriting History?
Trump’s latest executive order attacks honest history in favor of a mythic past. Here’s why we must resist—and how.
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On March 27, Trump signed an executive order titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
As you would expect, the order contains neither truth nor sanity about U.S. history.
It opens by asserting that there has been a pernicious effort to rewrite history with the effect of stoking anti-American sentiments and division among the nation’s populace:
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
The order then lists several examples of this so-called “woke” history.
It says that several Smithsonian institutions—including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the American Art Museum, the National Zoo, and the in-progress American Women’s History Museum, among others—have been corrupted by “divisive, race-centered ideology.”
As a historian and a Black man in the United States, I have thoughts.
Fascism Always Tries to Rewrite History
In his book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, author Jason Stanley’s first chapter is on what he calls “The Mythic Past.”
Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present…The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.
When the president says “Make America Great Again” he is invoking visions of a mythic past that is, according to Stanley, “fictional, patriarchal, harshly conservative, ethnically and religiously pure.”
The purpose is to stir feelings of a fantastical bygone era when the nation was at its best, and use the feelings to create a desire to “go back” to those days.
Thus, the president’s executive order about Smithsonian institutions is, by definition, backward and regressive.
United States history is much easier for propagandists to exploit when it creates a past where everyone was white and all they did was right.
Revisionist History Depends on What You’re Revising
Immediately, when some people hear the term “revisionist history”, they think of it as a pejorative description. But it depends on what you are revising and according to what standards.
Since at least the 1960s, historians have been revising history.
They have emphasized race, gender, class, climate, and indigeneity, among other factors as lenses through which to view history and tell its stories.
These revisions were necessary to correct the “Great Man” view of history.
That is, history as told through the lives of so-called "great men” who shaped the nation’s founding—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and others.
A historian, Sean Lang, put it this way,
The ‘Great Man’ idea of history incorporates at least three concepts: that history is made by individuals; that those individuals are mostly men; and that they are to be regarded as great – not just important but, apart from a few villains, admirable as well. The second and third concepts have rightly taken a knocking for some years now; the first retains its importance.
The way the Great Man theory shaped the study of U.S. history is that it has over-emphasized the stories of white men to the exclusion of virtually every other group of people who all played a role in shaping the past.
The Smithsonian Institutions are attempting to offer a corrective to the Great Man approach to history by including the voices of Black people, other people of color, women, the poor, indigenous people, and a multitude of others whose stories have been under-appreciated or ignored.
The president’s executive order wants to drag society’s understanding of who shaped history back to a time when only white men were included in the history books because only white men had the power to write them.
Don’t Let This Executive Order Distract You from the Crimes
The timing of this executive order comes right as this political regime is facing some of the hardest blowback since the inauguration in January.
SignalGate was such an epic and public blunder that scrutiny on it has persisted even in the midst of a notoriously rapid news cycle and the flighty attention spans of the populace.
The scandal deserves sustained focus to hold those involved accountable, which would include resignations, firings, stricter oversight, and more.
This executive order targeting history is egregious. We are rightly outraged and dismayed.
We also need to chip away at the illusion of fascism’s invulnerability by taking this regime to court, holding hearings, and amplifying their notorious acts to impede their ability to commit crimes and dismantle democracy.
Stay focused.
Get Creative about How to Teach and Learn History
If this regime continues bulldozing U.S. institutions like the Smithsonian, then we can expect that the ways of accessing history we have come to rely on will no longer be an option.
Going to Smithsonian Institute museums and exhibits is a perennial highlight of visiting the nation’s capital. What happens when those museums no longer tell a robust, inclusive past but become shrines of propaganda and nationalism?
Do we simply stop studying history because we can’t trust what ultra-nationalist politicians have done to its presentation?
Of course not. We start teaching and learning history in other ways.
We need our own versions of “Freedom Schools.”
In the 1960s, Freedom Schools taught kids and adults about civic participation. They also taught Black people about their own history which had been excluded from white-controlled institutions and textbooks.
Sunday Schools, vacation Bible schools, book studies, speaking series, and more can be turned toward the purpose of sharing the history this regime does not want you to know.
The Information Age gives us access to reams of history. But the deluge of information needs to be organized in an understandable and easily accessible way.
Video series on YouTube, social media channels dedicated to history, podcasts—all of these can be harnessed to present the history we all need to know.
I’ve dedicated my career to studying history.
This is why all of my books—The Color of Compromise, How to Fight Racism, and The Spirit of Justice—all include history.
Maybe it’s time to start up a book study to resist the malicious attempt to whitewash our nation’s past.
When fascism comes for the future, it starts by rewriting the past.
Don’t be fooled by patriotic packaging—this is propaganda in action. It’s time to get creative, stay vigilant, and keep telling the full, complicated, liberating truth.
What’s one thing you were never taught in school about U.S. history that you wish you had learned earlier? Comment below.
If this article stirred something in you, The Spirit of Justice will take you deeper. Through true stories of faith, race, and resistance, it reveals the kind of history this regime wants to erase—and why we can’t let them.
I wish that slavery had not been presented a solely a "Southern" issue, and a seriously white-washed one at that. Taking the Diocese of New Jersey's Anti-Racism Training, I have been surprised to learn how pervasive slavery was in New Jersey, even--gasp!--in the central and northern parts of the state. And how much of the wealth of the Colonial-era churches was created on the backs of enslaved people.
My Lord! This administration is exhausting.