May 5, 2025

Making Ignorance Sacred Again: Keeping ScOR #7

May 5, 2025

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera

It seems if you’re trying for an autocratic takeover, you want to control just about everything. You want power over the administrative state and everyone in it, including agencies that are meant to be independent. You’ll try to neuter or commandeer the legislature, the courts, the big law firms. You’ll seek to control the news media and the universities. If you can, you’re going to take charge of the immigration system so you can decide who is a citizen, who stays in the country or gets whisked away to a foreign gulag, who is or isn’t a person deserving of human and legal rights. You’ll want possession of private information on everybody so you can use that data to attack your enemies.

You want all this power so you can shape the future, but you’ll also want to seize control of the past.

So, right on schedule, while brazenly attempting all of the above, the second Trump Administration has launched efforts to wrangle control of the national story and how it’s told.

Just days after taking office in January, Trump issued executive orders advancing “patriotic education.” One, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” seeks to end instruction about transgender issues, White privilege, and unconscious bias.

In a March executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY,” Trump declared that “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.”

Orwell could not have said it better himself. Because of course Trump is doing precisely what he accuses his opponents of doing: replacing facts with ideology. His order tasks Vice President JD Vance with revamping the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex, “by seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”

Improper ideology? Those running the museums must henceforth, for example, “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.” The Institution must “celebrate the achievements of women in the American Women’s History Museum and … not recognize men as women in any respect in the Museum.”

Trump’s order goes after the Smithsonian under “the prior administration.” It singles out an art exhibit called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” because the exhibit points out that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”

You don’t say.

Trump’s order takes issue with the same exhibit for promoting “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

The author of Trump’s executive order doesn’t explain what’s wrong with these historically and scientifically uncontroversial statements. The administration apparently assumes that everyone – in the intended audience, anyway, the MAGA base – will nod in agreement that this is typical woke nonsense.

Millions of Americans still treasure their ignorance and will do their best to defend it. But a whole lot of us feel differently.

The administration has made headlines by stripping out references to the achievements of women and of non-White and LGBTQ people from National Park Service exhibits. Trump’s budget proposal calls for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities — which funds a plethora of public history projects every year — as well as the National Endowment for the Arts.

In yet another salvo, Trump declared in late April, in a social media post, that he was “hereby reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations, as it has had for all of the many decades before!" Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1934 and that has not changed, though in recent years some states and cities began recognizing Indigenous People’s Day on the same date. Joe Biden became the first president to do so in a 2021 proclamation. A few dozen jurisdictions have taken down Columbus statues, recognizing that the explorer’s legacy, besides “discovering” the “New World,” also includes "pillaging, raping and generally setting in motion a genocide of the people who were already here," as Shannon Speed, a Chickasaw Nation member and director of UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, put it to NPR.

Trump makes no effort to defend Columbus on the facts, claiming instead that Columbus’s critics are the ones guilty of prejudice – against, you know, Italians. “The Democrats did everything possible to destroy Christopher Columbus, his reputation, and all of the Italians that love him so much,” Trump wrote. “They tore down his Statues, and put up nothing but ‘WOKE,’ or even worse, nothing at all! Well, you’ll be happy to know, Christopher is going to make a major comeback.”

Trump and his henchpersons want to return men like Columbus to their pedestals for obvious reasons. If they can re-establish Columbus as an untarnished hero – along with America’s slaveholding founders – maybe that will stop all this bothersome talk about injustices done to oppressed groups, both past and present, and discredit any efforts at redress and repair. Only a “Radical Left Lunatic” would want to dwell on the racist, sexist, homophobic or economic abuses carried out by historical figures – or by the current regime. Enough with all that.

*

This is just one of the ways Trump is trying to drag the United States many decades into the past. He wants to restore the economy of the McKinley Administration, the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow era, the gender and sexual politics of Ozzie and Harriet (and Hugh Hefner) — and the historical sensibility of White America circa, oh, 1959. That was the year James Baldwin wrote the unforgettable line, “Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.”

Several times on Scene on Radio my collaborators and I have mentioned (White) Americans’ collective lack of interest in history and, yes, our willful historical ignorance. Pre-Trump, the U.S. government had never sought to impose “patriotic education.” Instead, the majority of Americans had learned to embrace collective forgetting as a kind of national custom.

But even the most jaded observer has to admit that as a society we’ve made progress on this front since Baldwin’s time. Many have pointed to the 1977 TV series Roots, and Ken Burns’s 1990 Civil War documentary series, which, though flawed, drew big audiences and taught millions of Americans that history could be entertaining and edifying. Lo and behold, we could look at our nation’s brutal past and not crumble into dust. Since the 1980s or so, academic historians have updated the field’s understanding of American slavery, the Revolutionary era, Reconstruction, labor history, voting rights struggles and more, producing a less laudatory but more accurate national story. Documentarians, writers, filmmakers, and museum curators have brought that scholarship to wider audiences. We got “12 Years a Slave,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” the Tulsa Massacre episode from “The Watchmen,” the 1619 Project. All found hungry audiences. When I decided in 2016 to produce a series about the history of Whiteness and White supremacy, I figured I’d lose half the listeners that our young podcast had at the time. Who would want to hear such a thing? Certainly not many White folks, I thought. I was wrong. In part because of the strong response from listeners, Scene on Radio evolved into a podcast that dives repeatedly into history.

Studies have found Americans are not as divided on the teaching of history as we might think.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, droves of people sought out documentaries about the history of race, and books about whiteness and antiracism shot to the top of bestseller lists. Millions of people of all shades poured into the streets demanding change, especially an end to police violence against Black people.

That energy soon seemed to evaporate and the backlash followed. But such a strong reaction suggests that something potent was happening — something that powerful people felt the need to lash back at. I’m not convinced that the steps Americans have taken towards accepting the nation’s hard history were suddenly erased just because Fox News got mad, the protests wound down, and corporations backslid on DEI. Some among us got our hopes too high about the “racial reckoning” of 2020, but we may have overstated the decisiveness of the backlash, too. The toothpaste can’t be shoved back into the tube that easily.

Multiple studies have found that Americans are not as divided on the teaching of history as we might think based on news reports and social media spitting matches. In a 2021 survey, Americans were asked if it’s acceptable to teach “about the harm some people have done to others, even if that subject matter causes learners discomfort.” 77% said yes; only 23% said no. This goes to show that the people banning books and screaming about “CRT” at school board meetings constitute a small minority. A study in 2023 found that people on the right and the left overestimate the extremism of their opponents. As researcher Paul Oshinski put it: “In studying perception gaps around American history, we found that Republicans think Democrats want to teach a history exclusively defined by shameful oppression and guilt, while Democrats believe Republicans want to overlook grave injustices like slavery and racism — yet both impressions are incorrect.”

For example, Oshinski’s study found, 93% of Republicans agree that “Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks should be taught as examples of Americans who fought for equality,” and 83% of Democrats believe “students should not be made to feel guilty or personally responsible for the errors of prior generations” — both much higher figures than the other side estimated.

All this suggests that the Trump Administration’s anti-history crusade doesn’t have a huge constituency. The campaign will have a chilling effect in some places, and that’s bad, but millions of Americans have come to see truths about U.S. history that we can’t unsee. Trump’s cringeworthy decrees won’t end our healthy debates about the past.

Just the other week in western North Carolina, citizens spoke to the Jackson County commission about an ongoing controversy over a Confederate memorial. David Joy, a novelist and a descendant of enslavers, made remarks that went viral — I encourage you to watch the first couple minutes of this video. When Joy was a child, he said, the Confederate flag and the history it represented were revered among the people he knew. “And then,” he says, “I grew up. And I read books.”

Yes, millions of Americans still treasure their ignorance and will do their best to defend it. But a whole lot of us feel differently. It’s not 1959 anymore. Trump’s attack on history, though egregious, won’t succeed — not least because his larger campaign to make himself a dictator shows signs of stalling out, anyway.

Pass it on, people: We’re not going back.

Comments are open. What do you think? How can each of us push back to defend the teaching and dissemination of honest, accurate history?

Know someone who’d like Keeping ScOR? Please forward this to them or send them this link. And thank you!

Scene on Radio the podcast is available wherever you get your shows, and at sceneonradio.org.