The Trump White House has declared war on history itself.
In an official article published Friday on the White House website, the administration blasted the Smithsonian Institution for telling the truth about slavery, systemic racism, and inequality in America.
The White House mocked exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) for daring to explain that America privileges whiteness. It dismissed scholarship on the legacies of slavery in the Texas Revolution, ridiculed art that reckons with the Middle Passage, and condemned programs that document systemic exclusion in immigration and housing.
It went further, painting the Smithsonian as “anti-American propaganda” for highlighting the ways colonization, racism, and oppression shaped the very foundations of the nation.
“This plan aims to remove any exhibit or artifact that does not align with [Trump’s] definition of American exceptionalism,” Karsonya “Kaye” Whitehead, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), said in a statement.
Slavery was not just an economic system — it was a regime of terror. Families were ripped apart, women were violated, men were chained, and entire generations were forced into labor that built the wealth of this nation. When emancipation finally came, Reconstruction briefly promised equality.
Black men held office, built schools, and claimed rights once denied. But white supremacy roared back with violence and legal restrictions. Reconstruction collapsed, and Jim Crow rose in its place.
For nearly a century, Jim Crow laws ensured Black Americans could not vote freely, attend equal schools, or live without fear of lynching.
Critics note the White House’s attempt to dismiss museums for teaching about this reality is nothing less than an attempt to silence that history.
“These steps are veiled attempts to rewrite and distort the narrative by removing any mention of the racist actions, words, and deeds that have shaped American history,” added the president of ASALH– the organization that founded Black History Month. “This regime is actively seeking to erase the lived experiences of Black people.
When Jim Crow ended, systemic racism mutated. The federal government backed redlining policies that locked Black families out of home ownership, while white families accumulated wealth through suburban expansion.
Gentrification decades later uprooted Black communities in cities, pushing families out of neighborhoods they had called home for generations.
Then came the war on drugs. Entire communities were criminalized. Harsh sentencing laws and targeted policing filled prisons with Black and brown bodies, devastating families and stripping away economic and political power.
Further, the Civil Rights Movement forced America to confront its hypocrisy. Through marches, sit-ins, and court victories, Black Americans dismantled legal segregation, but every gain came with backlash.
The Smithsonian’s exhibits on democracy document this truth, however, the White House calls it subversive.
“Our history is both brutal and ugly and poignant and beautiful—from the forced arrival of our ancestors to these shores to the Black men who fought,” Whitehead said, “to the work that was done during Black Lives Matter to reform community policing.”
The attempt to rewrite history is part of a wider campaign. This White House has moved to criminalize protest, weaken civil rights protections, and silence Black leaders. Attacking the Smithsonian is about controlling the narrative—deciding whose story matters and whose story gets erased.
The truth is this: America’s history is not just one of freedom and triumph. It is also one of bondage, violence, exclusion, and systemic theft of opportunity. To erase that truth is to dishonor every enslaved man, every woman denied her humanity, every family displaced by redlining, every child funneled into mass incarceration.
The Smithsonian was created to tell America’s story in full. Today, that mission is under direct assault from a White House that has chosen denial over truth.
“ASALH stands in fierce opposition to this latest directive and all efforts to erase or destroy our history, to silence our voices, and minimize our story,” said Whitehead. “These are our stories and our stories, both individual and collective, matter. Our voices and our sacrifices matter.”
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) released a statement after President Donald Trump’s threats, posted to Truth Social, calling the Smithsonian too “woke” earlier this month.
“No president has the legitimate authority to impose such a review,” OAH wrote. “Established by Congress in 1846 as a unique and independent agency, the Smithsonian Institution is not, and has never been, under the authority of the Executive Branch. It is an independent statutory agency, led by the Secretary and governed by a bipartisan Board of Regents as established by law.”