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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/31/donald-trump-america-history-museums-smithsonian-institution>
"It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington
DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national
museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald
Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of
the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The
institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive,
race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as
inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue
of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit
expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to
remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to
American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.
The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of
himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the
supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded
Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center
was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were
deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out
for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s
History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be
pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American
History and Culture; and an exhibition titled
The Shape of Power: Stories of
Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.
I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of
weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I
visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative
that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national
story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum
offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where
one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron
ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship’s cargo of enslaved
people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas
and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze
on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural
richness that has nevertheless effloresced.
Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of
Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would
open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the
difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects
– from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had
put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects –
a bonnet embroidered by someone’s enslaved grandmother, for example – were
arriving into the new collection.
Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian
Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen’s University Belfast
last year, that history can be used to “understand the tensions that have
divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the
growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.” That compassionate vision
of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better
understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist
spirit of Trump’s executive order, in which history is reduced to “our Nation’s
unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human
happiness”. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion
of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting
and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its
visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
