I don’t know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture — or as it’s more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months. On March 27, he issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” an executive order that accused the Smithsonian Institution of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He called out the Black Smithsonian in particular for being subject “to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” The federal government, he declared, will no longer support historical projects that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”
I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.
The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. That white lady at the supermarket with her 6-year-old daughter has organized her life around defending her privilege? I’m not seeing it.
I shudder at suggestions that — as a graphic on the Black Smithsonian’s own website put it a few years ago — “objective, rational, linear thinking,” “quantitative emphasis” and “decision-making” are the purview of white culture. I despise equally the idea that Black people are communal, oral, “I’ll get to that tomorrow” sorts who like to circle around the answer rather than actually arrive at it.
And I am especially dismayed at how this version of history implies that the most interesting thing about the experience of Black Americans has been their encounter with whiteness. I figured that the president was being typically hyperbolic when he said that institutions like the museum deepen “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” — I mean, even something as stupid as that guide to whiteness might just be an outlying mistake. But I was wary that a national museum might squander its chance to illuminate complex topics and expand people’s curiosity, instead trying to corral everyone into caricatures and oversimplifications. As I read the executive order, however, it occurred to me that after all these years, I had yet to actually visit the museum. So, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I decided to zip over to the National Mall to take a look. I will not soon forget what I saw.
The study of Black America didn’t always look this way. A century ago, when the field was still young, our history was read as a process of overcoming, becoming a part of America, showing ourselves at our best.
There is no Pollyannaism in the celebrated texts of that era — slavery, murder and Jim Crow are well covered. But the Black historian Carter G. Woodson in his 1922 book “The Negro in Our History” sets out to explain “the history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro in this country” and “how the Negro has been influenced by contact with the Caucasian and to emphasize what the former has contributed to civilization.” A Black history whose main focus was grievance would not have occurred to him. You can tell from the chapter titles alone: “Self-Assertion,” “Blazing the Way,” “Achievements in Freedom,” “Health and Spirit” and “Toward Economic Efficiency.” White allies were similarly disinclined to engage Black history as a tirade. In 1936, the white historian Ina Corinne Brown, in “The Story of the American Negro,” introduced us to “interesting and significant human beings, neither better nor worse than other folk of like opportunities, that I have tried to present” in “these pages.”
Today, books like these would be regarded as quaint — or worse. The pride that the Black Power era instilled for many people was based in an oppositional stance. From the late 1960s on, it felt like the goal of the majority of Black studies was smoking out and decrying racism rather than exploring how to get past it.
The contrasts were stark. In 1957, the television documentary series “See It Now,” which portrayed the Black contralto Marian Anderson’s tour of Asia, included antagonistic questions she was asked about Gov. Orval Faubus, who was at the time preventing nine Black children from entering Central High in Little Rock, Ark. A viewer wrote the television station, complaining that the documentary had focused too much on that hateful incident rather than “the many of our race who are on top.” In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the classy television sitcom “Julia” depicted a middle-class Black nurse, played by Diahann Carroll, and her son. Ten years prior, Black critics would have adored it. But in the new era, Robert Lewis Shayon decried it for not depicting the many of his race who were on the bottom, calling the show “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.”
Under this new ideological imperative, the purpose of studying Black history was to utter an extended cry of weakness, to offer consolation rather than encouragement, and to trace present-day disparities to all but insuperable legacies. Mba Mbulu’s “Ten Lessons: An Introduction to Black History” treated Black history as a smudge of slavery and segregation, with chapter titles like “White People’s Attacks on Other People,” “Black People in White History” and “Back in Our Place.” John Hope Franklin’s foundational Black history text, “From Slavery to Freedom,” is informative in many ways, but steeped in the same sense that Black history is primarily about frustration and defeat at the hands of white people, such as tracing the development of troubled and violent inner cities, a hugely complex phenomenon, simply to white flight.
The literature professor Robert Chrisman and the scholar-activist Ernest Allen Jr. wrote that “racism continues as an ideology and a material force within the U.S., providing Blacks with no ladder that reaches the top.” The lawyer and activist Randall Robinson wrote that slavery “has hulled empty a whole race of people.” Where do you go from there? And why even bother trying?
From afar, the Black Smithsonian looks like a stepsibling of its better known and longer established neighbors. The National Museum of Natural History, with its august columns and stolid air, seems to have stood guard on the National Mall since time immemorial. The Air and Space Museum, a vast expanse of minimalist geometry, announces its ambitions with a gleaming bolt of stainless steel pointing brashly to the sky. The National Museum of African American History and Culture appears to be a less showy structure, compact and clad in something the color of reddish clay. Up close you see that it is in fact a delicate and intricate latticework. In the coolness of the lobby, light flows in and sightlines flow out, as if to welcome the world.
But what most struck me about the museum was its dazzling abundance. There is so much to see, hear and read that the museum would require multiple visits to fully take in, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Want to learn about Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress who was also an activist and memoirist? Or the gustatorial splendors of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans? Although he was a Harlem phenom in the 1910s and 1920s, did you happen to know who the radical orator and pamphleteer Hubert Harrison was? I have always wished Spike Lee would do a movie, with the cinematography in slightly faded Kodacolor to summon the era, dramatizing the National Black Political Convention of 1972 in Gary, Ind., and learning about it at the museum, you get an idea why.
None of this is divisive; it’s delicious. Having so very many artifacts, photographs and recordings gathered in one place brings the past to life more vibrantly than books alone could. The museum’s teachings are never strident or rhetorical. One example that struck me: an exhibition text that stated that starting in the 1950s, when Black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, white flight “often” ensued. Often, rather than always. That kind of nuance is all too rare in discussions of morally and emotionally charged issues. But in such situations, it’s all the more valuable.
When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my mother once or twice took me to the Black history museum there. This was the late ’70s, and at least in those days, the museum was a determinedly gloomy experience — to a grade schooler, at least, seemingly all slavery and snarling police dogs and despair. Nothing made me feel truly connected to the material. I wished instead that we were at the city’s Academy of Natural Sciences museum, or anywhere that was about wonder, creation, something more positive than just misery and name-checking the accomplishments of occasional isolated figures such as George Washington Carver. The Black Smithsonian would not have left junior me feeling that way. It would have inspired me, and awakened a new understanding of my people and their journey. I wish I could have experienced it way back then, but it was worth the wait.
Visitors to the museum can start on the basement level, shrouded in darkness as if we were in a slave ship’s hold. The sound system plays the lurchings of a heavily loaded wooden ship at sail, a sound the enslaved would have heard ceaselessly for months. We see preserved artifacts from slave ships, manacles that the slaves were bound by. One contemporary account describes how a slave ship’s deck was covered in blood and mucus, resembling something more like a battlefield. Pictures show how the people were packed in, stacked up, mired in their own filth. Absorbing it all was powerful in a way that no film I am aware of has gotten across — the despair, the stench, the sexual violation even during the passage, how many subjected to it jumped overboard, surely to drown or be devoured by sharks, rather than endure what was ahead.
As visitors move forward through history, we walk up gently sloped ramps into succeeding eras, then up further still, until we get to this century and we are up on the ground floor, standing in the daylight. This arrangement draws visitors into a participatory journey, a physicalized kind of argument, that our story is one of progress, rising, arising, emergence and blinking in the unfamiliar light. The journey is thrilling and it’s devastating, but most of all it is inspiring. We need more of that.
Ralph Ellison asked in 1944 if a people can “develop over 300 years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” It is true that Black people have been central in compelling America to stand up for its humanist ideals, as The 1619 Project teaches. But we cannot base our sense of self on an act of rebuke against someone else. Our importance is much greater.
A smart, educated Black woman once said to me, casually, “I think we’ll always be a sad people.” But why would any humans settle for sadness? We should acknowledge the tragedy, yes, but what we did well should be celebrated at least as loudly.
Exhibit A: the grand old Black business districts in American cities in the first half of the 20th century. We learn about the ones that were brutally burned down: Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921. These are utterly gruesome stories that must be told, and the museum does so. But the vast majority of Black business districts, such as Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C., San Francisco’s Western Addition and the Black Belt in Los Angeles, did not suffer this fate. They were, in their time, victories.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. once described a feeling of awe while watching “Amos ’n’ Andy,” the early 1950s sitcom, when he was a kid. “What really captivated me was that in the all-Black world of ‘Amos ’n’ Andy,’” he wrote, “there was an all-Black department store, owned and operated by Black attendants for a Black clientele.” He had never experienced that world in real life, and certainly didn’t see it in most television shows. But it wasn’t just a story.
The Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago had several competing newspapers: The Bee occupied a lovely Art Deco building. The Defender taught Blacks to migrate north. There were many Black-owned banks. The Overton Hygienic building was a magnificent edifice and housed a cosmetics company, a life insurance company, a big bank and a drugstore. The neighborhood was home to no fewer than seven insurance companies and many hotels, including the gorgeous 200-room Hotel Brookmont. Provident was one of the top Black hospitals in the country, where Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery in 1893. Bronzeville was a Black paradise. You won’t find Bronzeville covered in Franklin’s “From Slavery to Freedom,” but it’s there in the Black Smithsonian.
Or think of the way that Blackness occupies the heart of the American musical sensibility. The harmonies of jazz and soul, the kind of rhythm we know as “jamming,” the gospel-inflected singing style that is now the cross-racial default — all of this is Black in origin. I attended a bat mitzvah recently, and much of the music was set to a funky beat no one in Sholem Aleichem stories would have known.
A serious Black history must accommodate these triumphs. It must allow for contradictions and moral complexity. We celebrate the end of segregation and the power of the civil rights era, and rightly so. But as with any sweeping historical change, not all the secondary and tertiary consequences were equally beneficial. Take those Black business districts. Once Black people had access to the vaster resources, wider variety and sometimes higher quality available in mainstream stores, they took their custom elsewhere. This — as opposed to white flight — is a big part of why these thriving Black alternate universes no longer exist.
Complexity is also relevant to how we process Booker T. Washington. In his “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895, he declared that white and Black people could live “separate as the fingers yet one as the hand.” Because that would ensure more segregation and disenfranchisement, he is typically depicted as being OK with racism. By contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois, an antiracist by today’s standard, decried racism and segregation while seeking to promote leadership by a “talented tenth” of Black people. Washington deserves better than that simplistic comparison. His vision for separate living was meant to be temporary; behind the scenes, he fought hard against racism. And his perhaps more cautious approach was shaped by having grown up in slavery, encountering bigotry and violence in a way that Du Bois never could, growing up in small-town Massachusetts. Washington was a much more progressive and interesting figure than one might think from reading many historians today, and very popular among Black people of all classes. You can hear it in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” “Du Bois? Who is dat?” a preacher asks. ”Man, he can’t be smart ez Booger T.!”
A serious Black history must also wrestle with the fact that African kingdoms played a central role in the slave trade. (I wish the museum had done more here.) They profited by selling war captives to the Europeans, who could never have satisfied their rapidly expanding market by simply snatching people one by one, the way we saw Kunta Kinte caught in “Roots.” The evil may not have been equally distributed, but it existed on both sides of the equation.
As for white people, no, the Black Smithsonian does not on the whole present them as anything like heroes. That doesn’t make the museum polarizing. Fairness does not require us to bury unpleasant memories or pretend that horrors never took place. Reasonable people can and should grapple with a past, present and future all at once.
The message of too much Black history has been a gloomy “Yes, we can’t.” It underestimates the human resilience that actual Black people have demonstrated so abundantly and so consistently over the 406 years of our presence on this continent. The question by which the Black Smithsonian should be judged is whether it represents the past in a way that helps us surmount the present and create the future. In showing us both the manacles that enslaved people were bound by during the Middle Passage and the nation within a nation that the Black community’s network of businesses, churches and lodges became, both the lynchings and the election — twice — of a Black president, the museum does a magnificent job. It is an example that other institutions should follow. It does not shy away from the tragedies, but neither does it give short shrift to the joy. It contains all of it, and trusts everyone to tolerate — no, celebrate — the contradictions.
Mr. Trump’s problem with the Black Smithsonian is rooted in an objection, legitimate in itself, to what has come to be called D.E.I. That acronym is too often a euphemism for a performatively institutionalized crusade against something called whiteness. What started as an academic critique grew into a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy that did nothing to improve the lives and opportunities of Black people — and a great deal to irritate and alienate white people.
The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”
Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.
A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.
So is the idea is that any teachings about Black history are a form of political agitation, “radical and wasteful,” as another executive order on D.E.I. has it. That our country openly addresses Black history in all of its facets is a badge of honor and sophistication, and the institution that Mr. Trump called out as harming our view of American history is an exemplar of all the field could be. The president and his minions should just walk on by. The rest of us should walk on in.
John McWhorter is a Columbia University linguist who writes about how race and language shape our politics and culture. He is the author, most recently, of “Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.”
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John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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