A white nationalist vision of American history is one that centers the role of white Americans above all others and, in fact, typically treats the history of the nation and the race as one and the same. For white nationalists, the United States is a nation created and founded by white people, and American history necessarily spurns the contributions of all other groups. The sins of slavery, segregation, and violence are excused as minor blemishes made along a path toward greatness. It was the accomplishments of America’s great white men, we are led to believe, that brought us the prosperity for which we should all be so thankful. To question them—even if they enslaved, raped, and killed for power, expansion, or wealth—would be to question America itself.
Meanwhile, Black historians such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Hope Franklin were literally segregated from the archives, banned from studying in Southern libraries because they were Black. When Franklin went to an archive to conduct research, he recalled, “My arrival created a panic and an emergency among the administrators…. The archivist frankly informed me that I was the first Negro who had sought to use the facilities there.” Black people were not supposed to be in the archives, let alone be in charge of telling America’s history.
The good news is that today, in spite of Trump’s efforts, historians are telling more complete stories, ones that don’t rely on half-baked truths, veiled hypocrisies, or a racially segregated professoriat. And the public is hungry for works that offer a more complete retelling of the American experience. Buoyed by the Black Lives Matter movement, African American history in particular has surged in popularity. From bestselling Black history books like The Warmth of Other Suns to The New York Times’ 1619 Project to the explosively popular genre of Black historical fiction and film, African American history is now enmeshed in popular culture as never before. Books like James and films like Sinners center the Black experience, drawing millions of readers and viewers yearning for Black stories from the past. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 created a tidal wave of white sympathy for the African American experience. Amid such demand, the federal government and so many of America’s institutions, from the Smithsonian to the National Football League, responded with efforts to better teach and study the history of race in America. Juneteenth finally became a federal holiday in 2021.
On Juneteenth, the federal holiday established after George Floyd to commemorate Emancipation, Trump decided against issuing a formal holiday greeting, choosing instead to argue that America had too many holidays that took away from economic productivity. Of all the federal holidays to dismiss, of course it was the one expressly dedicated to a Black cause.
On Juneteenth, the federal holiday established after George Floyd to commemorate Emancipation, Trump decided against issuing a formal holiday greeting, choosing instead to argue that America had too many holidays that took away from economic productivity. Of all the federal holidays to dismiss, of course it was the one expressly dedicated to a Black cause. A Trump executive order in March called for citizens’ support in “advancing the policy of this order,” in other words, reporting federal historical sites that spend too much time focusing on the perspectives of nonwhites. The UDC would be proud. In fact, one historian of Civil War memory noted that Trump’s Black History Month Proclamation “reads as if it was released from the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.”
And yet, Trump 2.0’s flawed and racist approach to history will probably offer little in the way of substantive change for serious historical study. The Trump allies promoting censorship are only interested in prevention, not innovative creation, ceding the field to those of us who really do care about honest history. And unfortunately for Trump and his supporters, the censors can’t reach everywhere. Knowledge today comes from many quarters. Millions of students may be blocked from learning American history in public school classrooms, but the Trump administration cannot completely block them from accessing American history from other venues. Today’s censors will never again enjoy the same stranglehold that white nationalists once had on the production of the past. Even if an eighth grader in South Carolina is blocked from studying Frederick Douglass in their classroom, state laws cannot prevent them from accessing additional information online, in film, or in podcasts.
I have been teaching those ugly episodes for years, but the reactions of my students this spring were different than ever before. Students now recognize their present in the past. There was a time when the sight of adults screaming at school board meetings might have appeared very foreign. Now, that’s just part of America’s political culture. The incivility of the present helps us to understand the ugliness of the past.
Perhaps the greatest consequence of Trump’s second term will be the retardation of America’s ability to have a true national reckoning on race. The United States has not deeply explored its own racial history with an eye toward a constructive public process of reconciliation. Historians argue that such a reckoning, if done well, would hold the promise to help us break free from the cancerous orbit of race that has poisoned life in America since its founding. The ancient hope of that reconciliation is precisely what Trumpism and its enablers intend to prevent. After a brief moment when some historians began discussing the possibility of a “Third Reconstruction,” Trump 2.0 brings the full force of the federal government against that promise, erasing Black and Brown histories from public display and recentering white voices above all others so as to align with the white nationalist fairy tale that they tell themselves is America.
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