Making America White (and Male) Again
Millions of Americans are reeling from the deep erosion of their retirement savings and the shock of wholesale cuts in people and programs supporting schools, healthcare, safety and Social Security. They’re angry at the distain and ethical conflicts of the billionaire boys club ruling and, arguably, ruining our country. They’re angry at Donald Trump’s seemingly whimsical tariffs and nervous as the stock market spirals all over the place.
But beneath the chaos and turbulence intentionally wrought by the Trump Administration lies a more insidious, sustained and sharply focused agenda that in the long run is even more terrifying than the hollowing out of retirement savings and the rising co-existing risks of runaway inflation and recession.
Donald Trump and his ideological allies are working feverishly to eliminate at least 100 years of American history. This goes far beyond his relentless efforts to eliminate all DEI policies and funds. It’s at the heart of his effort to expunge language from federal documents and web sites. It is at the center of his effort to censor school and university curricula, libraries and national museums. It is even, arguably, a plausible explanation of the administration’s spreading and largely subterranean assault on fully documented immigrants, many of them students at some of the country’s leading colleges and universities.
So much else is going on, however, that the story has not gotten the sustained attention it deserves.
Take late last week. That’s when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered 381 books expunged from the shelves of the U.S. Naval Academy library. Wrote Robert P. Jones, the author of No. 46 on the list, “White Too Long: A Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,”:
“Book bans are aggressive, systematic forms of lying, both about the past and the present. Removing these books from the academic library—which almost certainly excludes them from course adoption—means that any student attending the once-prestigious Naval Academy will receive a distorted education.”
Consider the first three titles on Hegseth’s list:
1) “How to be an Anti-Racist,” by Ibram X. Kendi
2) “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,” by Emmanuel Acho
3) “Why Don’t We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland,” by Isaac J. Bailey
Among the other authors whose books were stripped from the shelves: poet, Pulitzer Prize nominee and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Maya Angelou. Also banned were studies about the Ku Klux Klan and the history of lynching in the United States, and an examination of the depiction of women in the Holocaust, The New York Times reported.
And yet, when I typed in the terms “U.S. Naval Academy” and “book bans” at news.google.com, I discovered articles in major daily newspapers and some TV stations, but no sustained outcry or coverage. I can only hope that changes as Congress returns.
Hegseth’s order came a week after Donald Trump issued an executive order to force the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate programs and exhibitions that advance “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from its museums, PBS reported. Trump took special aim at the spectacular National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in 2016.
“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn,” Trump said. “Not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” One can only guess that displays of lynching and slavery in the museum will fit his definition of “divisive narratives,” though reinstalling statues and renaming military bases after Confederate Army generals do not.
Noted David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, “This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.”
In mid-March, pages on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the grave sites of black and female soldiers vanished, The Times reported. In the same article, The Times quoted the statement of a Pentagon spokesman who said proudly, “DEI is dead at the Defense Department.”
It also is dead, or quickly dying, throughout the federal government, where agencies are hard at work stripping hundreds of words from documents and websites, a different Times article reported. These include the words “discrimination,” “female,” “black” and “racial justice.”
Precisely where things go next is hard to pinpoint, but the general direction is clear. The Trump Administration already has suspended the visas of at least 147 college and graduate students, some within weeks of defending doctoral dissertations, The Times reported this week. In most cases, no reason was given for the government’s action.
The Trump Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to allow the administration to resume flights to deport Venezuelans to a notorious and horrific El Salvadoran prison, though affording some due process to those arrested. The Atlantic has identified one of the men already sent there as an El Salvadoran-born Maryland father, never in a gang, who had been granted protected legal status in the United States and had lived here nearly 15 years.
The administration now acknowledges it arrested the man in error. Yet it refuses to seek his release, insisting that is beyond its jurisdiction. The case remains before the courts; the life of the father, who initially fled El Salvador, remains in jeopardy in captivity.
His case may well not be the only error. CBS News has reported it could find no criminal records on 179 alleged “gang members” deported to El Salvador. That is three-quarters of those who so far have been arrested and deported.
One can only wonder: Will U.S. citizens with brown or black skin be next?