To be a historian in the time of Trump 2.0 is to teach and write history at a time when the federal government is being mobilized to promote a white nationalist version of American history. Plenty of previous politicians offered tacit sympathies for white nationalist ideas with coded terms like “states’ rights” and “law and order,” but we have to journey back over one hundred years, to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, to find an executive branch so supportive of white nationalist ideologies in the study of American history.
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.
Various versions of this story exist. For decades, the most pervasive version of this mythology lived in the American South. From practically the day after the Civil War, white Southerners crafted a white nationalist morality tale—in popular culture, veterans’ organizations, and the Lost Cause ideology—of lazy Black slaves with generous white masters who in the 1860s did their best to fight off a war of “Northern Aggression” that threatened white Southern freedom. For most of the twentieth century, this story was advanced by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC—activists who dedicated much of their lives to celebrating white Confederate heritage. They published textbooks, erected monuments, and led public ceremonies honoring the legacy of the Southern white men who tried to destroy the United States.
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.
Since American public universities fully desegregated in the 1960s, historians of different backgrounds have thoroughly dispelled the Southern Lost Cause and other white nationalist mythologies. These historians see more nuance in Founding Fathers who called for freedom even as they enslaved humans. As Franklin explained of his groundbreaking book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, “My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.” Subsequent decades of cutting-edge research have rescued millions of nonwhite actors from the margins—Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and more—showing that they also played major roles in the formation of the United States. In other words, America wasn’t just built by white people. The struggles of millions, not only the brilliance of a select white few, are what made possible American affluence and endurance.
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.
Trump 2.0 seeks a reversal of all of these strides toward a pluralistic history. The new Trump administration is staking claims to racial morality by stressing the excesses of and seeking to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs that multiplied in the wake of George Floyd. The administration cannot make Americans uninterested in the history of race, nor can it turn back a cultural marketplace that offers serious profits for great stories about race in America. But it can use the tools of the state to influence, even poison, how history will be taught in America’s public forums and schools.
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.
Trump’s new administration is openly scrubbing historical government websites of Black and Brown people, removing references to American heroes like Medgar Evers, the Navajo Code Talkers, and the trailblazing female veterans, while also promising to restore the names of Confederates to military bases. Fort Bragg, originally named after a white supremacist Confederate general before being renamed Fort Liberty in 2023, has once again been renamed Fort Bragg (although it’s now cynically named for a different Bragg, a World War II soldier).
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.”
These approaches to history resurrect some of the very same failed historical arguments made by white nationalist groups of the past. And so part of being a historian during Trump 2.0 is to witness a renewal of debunked mythologies and outdated ideas made fresh by a state apparatus deeply invested in protecting the historical reputation of whiteness.
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.
Oddly enough, Trump 2.0 has also created opportunities for better understanding the history of race in America. It can be difficult for modern students to fully appreciate the intensity with which people fought over race in previous eras of American history. Across the country, even in the North, everyday white citizens were willing to go so far as to bomb school buses to stop the desegregation of elementary schools. Students struggle to understand the motivations of people like the women screaming at Black teenagers at Little Rock Central High School in 1957 or the activists who shouted, “Don’t wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese. Don’t wait until the burrheads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now,” in order to intimidate six-year-old Ruby Bridges when she entered the first grade in 1960 New Orleans.
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.
The post Trump’s White Nationalist Vision for the Future of History appeared first on New Republic.
