Trump is whitewashing American history

Viola Floyd Fletcher passed away on Nov. 24. At 111, she was the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a pogrom and an act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by thousands of white people that took place over the course of two days in the spring of 1921. The white mob killed at least 300 Black people in the prosperous neighborhood of Greenwood, Oklahoma, which was known as the “Black Wall Street,” and destroyed more than 1,200 homes and at least 60 businesses. Machine guns were used; airplanes dropped bombs. Survivors were forced into a concentration camp. In today’s money, the total damages are estimated at up to $200 million.

Black prosperity is a threat, a provocation and a collective narcissistic injury to what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of whiteness.” More than 100 years later, in the post-civil rights era and the Age of Trump, this remains true.

Historians and other experts estimate that from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction to the 1920s, dozens of Black communities were effectively destroyed by white mob actions and other acts of ethnic cleansing in the United States. 

Mother Fletcher, as she was known, was a crusader for justice and reparations for the survivors and descendants of the massacre, and she lived to see the city establish a $105 million fund that will begin to address the century of harm that was done to her and other Black residents. She was determined to shine a light on what, for many Americans on both sides of the color line, is a hidden and forgotten history.

During her testimony to Congress in 2021, Fletcher shared some of the horrors she witnessed during those days in Tulsa. “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.”

What Fletcher and others like her represent are threats to Donald Trump, America’s first White president. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has compellingly argued, Trump’s power in this role is not rooted in skin color or phenotype but in white identity politics and making “the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own… [Trump] is the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.”  

As part of Trump and his MAGA movement’s revolutionary project to return the country to the 19th century — what he and his messengers have termed “Make America Great Again” — the experiences and legacies of Black and brown people who speak uncomfortable truths about American society, such as Mother Fletcher, are being distorted and/or silenced in service to patriotism, American exceptionalism, white racial innocence and white victimhood. Even more than his first, Trump’s second administration is based on, as Nikole Hannah-Jones explained in the New York Times, “recast[ing] the white majority as the primary victims of systemic racial discrimination — though no evidence, not even self-reporting among white people, shows this to be true.”

The latest example of the MAGA revanchist project centers on attacking the only two federal holidays that honor Black American history. Earlier this week, Trump’s Interior Department announced it was ending free admission to national parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. Instead, those holidays will be replaced by Trump’s birthday, June 14, which is also Flag Day. The National Park Service, which is overseen by the department, will also begin charging non-U.S. residents more to visit its parks. This is an act of nativism presented semi-politely as “America-first pricing.”

Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and former president of the NAACP, summed it up perfectly on social media: “The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven.”

The Interior Department’s move reflects a much larger pattern of Orwellian behavior — especially around history and collective memory — in which the Trump administration and its allies are attempting to impose a thought-crime regime that punishes any attempts to look honestly and critically at America’s complex, ugly past (and present) of racism, injustice and inequality.

Ultimately, Trumpism is a White restoration project that cannot coexist with the symbolic power and meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. In many ways, they are fundamentally juxtaposed to each other.

Dr. King was an American patriot who was martyred for trying to bend the arc of the moral universe to justice. Donald Trump is no Dr. King.

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Juneteenth celebrates the end of white-on-Black chattel slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy. As leading historians such as Heather Cox Richardson and Nancy MacLean have compellingly shown, today’s “conservative” movement is the heir to the Confederacy, and to Jim and Jane Crow apartheid. The Confederate flag never flew over or in the Capitol during the Civil War. But on Jan. 6, 2021 that banner was proudly carried by one of Trump’s supporters through the building.  

Perhaps most importantly, the long Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movements are two of the most successful pro-democracy forces in history. As such, they offer deep lessons about resistance, endurance and hope during a time when America’s democracy is collapsing. Trump and his allies in the global authoritarian movement want to deprive the American people of those lessons.

Some observers in the media have described Trump’s move to replace Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth with his own birthday as an example of the president’s “megalomania.” But calling this “megalomania” trivializes the danger. It reduces Trump to a cartoon villain who monologues long enough for the hero to escape. In fact, he is far more dangerous: The president and his movement are pursuing a deliberate, systematic project.

There is a word for this in German: gleichschaltung. The coordination or synchronization of society, where politics, culture and public life are bent to the will of the leader, the party and the state.

We see this in the widespread use of Trump’s face: in the huge banners hanging on federal buildings across Washington featuring his scowl, and with Republicans who are trying to put him on money and on Mount Rushmore, alongside some of America’s greatest presidents. We’ve witnessed this with his military birthday parade and other celebrations, his demolition of historic parts of the White House (and plans to remake them in his image), his takeover of the Kennedy Center, his dispatching of MAGA emissary-commissars to Hollywood and his incredible demands that films such as “Rush Hour 4” be made simply because he likes them. 

If this process of gleichschaltung is successful, the American people will be consumed by Trumpism, MAGA and the ideologies and mass delusions of corrupt authoritarian power. Our ability to engage in reality testing could be greatly impaired, if not lost altogether.

To paraphrase George Orwell’s “1984,” one of the most powerful and effective ways to destroy a people is to obliterate their understanding of their own history, leaving them lost in the present and unable to have context for why they are suffering.

Hope-warriors and truth-tellers like Mother Viola Floyd Fletcher, and the long Black Freedom Struggle she fought in and represented, are a powerful counterforce to Trump and the larger authoritarian right’s project. This is why the president and his allies are doing everything they can to silence and bury them.