This receipt shows why Trump can’t whitewash America’s history
A president who thinks he’s a king targets African American Museum and “divisive narratives.”
Yesterday at 4:47 p.m. EDT,5 min
The “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond” gallery at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
With an angry executive order that targets the Smithsonian Institution — specifically taking aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture — President Donald Trump is brazenly trying to obscure and whitewash the past. He will fail.
This document, essentially a bill of sale, from the year of our nation’s founding shows why.
“Know all men by these presents that Benj. Weight of South Kingstown in the County of Kings County and Colony of Rhode Island, practitioner of physick, for and in consideration of the sum of one hundred Dollars, to me in hand well and truly paid by Beriah Brown Junr. of Exeter … do hereby acknowledge and myself therewith fully satisfied and paid, for one negro girl named Roose and her child named Cesar.”
–from article
Trump objects to what he sees as “divisive narratives” that cast chapters of our historical record “in a negative light.” The executive order, issued Thursday, claims that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that subjects visitors to “ideological indoctrination.”
