The administration criticizes Smithsonian focus on slavery and aims to micro-manage exhibits and wall texts across twenty-one museums. The effort intends to replace candid historical portrayals with "unifying and constructive" descriptions and to remove images deemed divisive, including a photo of Dr Anthony Fauci and immigrants at the border. The policy promotes an unblemished vision of American history that denies harms inflicted on Black and Indigenous peoples and mirrors the president's self-image of moral purity. The approach undermines DEI and reparative measures meant to address systemic inequities and lacks clarity and common sense.
Apparently, the purpose of removing programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race or promote ideologies inconsistent with federal law is to present the American past as an unblemished landscape of positivity and perfection, to pretend that nothing wrong let alone evil has been done on our shores since our nation's founding. The point is to create a national identity that mirrors the president's own view of himself as a model of moral purity,
If white America has never harmed, disenfranchised, enslaved and slaughtered our Black and Indigenous American populations, then clearly there's no reason to take the measures such as the establishment of DEI programs designed to remedy the inequities and cruelties that the powerful have inflicted on the weak. Like many ideas that have been issued from the Oval Office, this one doesn't seem to have been thought through with any clarity or even common sense.
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