Black Men Endured Sexual Exploitation Under Slavery. Their Story Is Rarely Told.

"In short, the president is attempting to whitewash U.S. history. Just think here of the removal of the Black Lives Matter Plaza and ground mural and the removal of Black history from museums, parks, and monuments. Think specifically of Donald Trump's attack on the Smithsonian Institution, which he charges with focusing too much on "how horrible our Country is, how bad slavery was.""

"Black knowledge production, Black self-understanding, and the power of Black people to represent ourselves is under attack, which means that Black identity and Black meaning-making practices are being erased. In The Mis-Education of the Negro, published in 1933, Black historian Carter G. Woodson wrote, "The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.""

Black knowledge production, Black self-understanding, and the power of Black people to represent themselves are under assault, resulting in erasure of Black identity and meaning-making practices. Historical control of Black education concentrated within oppressors produced mis-education and undermined Black uplift. Contemporary political actors seek to whitewash U.S. history by removing Black memorials, censoring museum content, and attacking institutions that document slavery's brutality. Assertions that portraying slavery's horrors is excessive attempt to recast traumatic histories as positive or negligible, denying Black existential dread and pain. Such erasure constitutes an assault on Black dignity and agency and perpetuates systemic racial denial.

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