“The goal of education isn’t to tell you that the world is sunshine and rainbows. The goal is enlightenment. The goal is some deeper understanding of humanity.” – Ta-nehisi Coates
Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced on social media that he’d instructed his attorneys to go through museums in Washington, D.C., “and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities,” to address what he rendered in all caps as “WOKE.”
In Trump’s dispatch, he targeted the “OUT OF CONTROL” Smithsonian, “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."
Beyond the distracting and colorful use of selective capitalization and the words in all caps, the move, unsurprisingly, provoked deep concerns from historians and researchers.
In a statement made to CNN, Sarah Weicksel, who serves as executive director of the American Historical Association, said that such interference with the work of museums “stands to impose a single and flawed view of American history onto the Smithsonian, placing at risk the integrity and accuracy of historical interpretation.”
As a historian, a big fan of museums and as someone who works in the media, to me, the idea of the government curating museum exhibits smacks of pure stupidity, as well as fascism. The first amendment/censorship issues cannot be screamed about enough here, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll limit the scope of my rant here.
Trust in museums among the general public is high. Information from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) states that 97% of Americans in a survey believe museums are educational assets in their communities, while 75% of those surveyed believe that museums are an important part of our society, with a role in supporting civic knowledge and participation. Also telling is that 92% of those surveyed believe museums are non-partisan providers of educational content.
If the government began to manicure museum exhibits to only represent ideologies the executive branch deems acceptable, then the public’s trust in museums would, undoubtedly, erode.
The job of the historian, and of museum exhibits, is not that of creating a vehicle for ideological celebration. History tells us a story of unbiased, and often unkind, events.
Quite often, I hear in conversations from people who don’t know Ulysses S. Grant from the Goo Goo Dolls mention “revisionist history,” and yes, while there has been a great deal of that rolling down the pike, this stated desire by Trump opens that door much wider.
On the topic of slavery, which seemed flippant, at best, in how Trump referenced it, it was bad. Very bad.
History tells the story of the way things were – not how they should have occurred. America did not benefit from slavery, and I don’t see how the story of how men and women were treated like animals could be interpreted as anything but bad. It was one of the darkest chapters in our country’s history.
Aside from the immoral inhumane aspect of slavery, the effects on the nation’s economy were disastrous, but then again, slavery always limits economic development, as we can see from studying world history.
Rome had what it needed for an industrial revolution, but its leaders wanted, instead, the preservation of a slave labor-based economy. The shortsightedness of the ruling class presented a significant contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire.
In America, it’s ridiculous to even consider if slavery was useful to the economy. The South suffered greatly, and after the outcome of the Civil War, the North moved on to develop and the South could not match its economic input until well into the 20th century.
The institution of slavery was built on pure exploitation, violence and outright denial of freedoms, and only served to enrich a small group of elites. Through violence, exploitation and denial of freedom, those elites got richer, but the broader economic development of the country was hindered, and a scar was left on its social and political fabric, which has taken generations to heal.
Trump’s Truth Social post, although full of bluster and “shoot first, aim later” vigor about the topic, was not clear as to what museums his attorneys would be reviewing in the name of cutting down on “WOKE.” The Smithsonian, which runs the nation’s major public museums, does derive 62% of its overall funding from Congressional appropriations.
With taxpayer funding going into the institution, it is natural to expect some sort of governmental oversight, yet the government needs to ultimately let the museum operate within its stated mission.
According to information I’ve found, the exhibits at the Smithsonian take many years of planning, and are heavily vetted by teams of scholars and museum experts before being made available to the public.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which houses the slavery exhibit, hosts the exhibit to “help a nation understand itself,” according to Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch III.
A Trump staffer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News last week that there “should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
Yes, Lindsey, we’ve come a long way since those days, true, but there are many other museum exhibits devoted to a variety of topics to illustrate the triumphs and, naturally, the tragedies, since.
The “Slavery and Freedom” exhibit, according to the description on the Smithsonian website, “explores the complex story of slavery and freedom,” and begins in the 15th century, in Africa and Europe and ends at post-Civil War Reconstruction.
There are many museums and exhibits that display the greatness of achievement within our country’s borders, but that exhibit under the Smithsonian’s roof is devoted to the story of slavery itself and is defined in its scope. To retool it would be revisionist history, at best.
