Chapter 1: What changes is the Trump administration making to the narrative of Black history?
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
Over the many years of raising kids in D.C. public schools, I've experienced Black History Month the way many Americans do. I've helped my kids make poster boards, and as they got older, PowerPoints, celebrating the achievements of many famous Black Americans. Jackie Robinson, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks.
Black History Month celebrations tend to follow what the Atlantic's Adam Harris calls a formula. But this year might call for something more radical.
Our country will be woke no longer.
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Chapter 2: How does Clint Smith describe the administration's approach to historical narratives?
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. Here is a missive from President Trump that typifies his attitude about Black history. Quote, The Smithsonian is, all caps, out of control. Where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, he posted over the summer.
The president has restored Confederate names to Army bases and removed lessons and images about slavery from federally funded institutions.
Well, the fight to restore a slavery exhibit in Philadelphia, it is ramping up after it was dismantled last week.
Just this week, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore panels at what's known as the President's House in Philadelphia that discussed, quote, the dirty business of slavery. The federal judge wrote, "...an agency cannot arbitrarily decide what is true based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership."
Today, we talked to two of my Atlantic colleagues, writer and podcast host Adam Harris and staff writer Clint Smith, who's also the author of How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Adam, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
Clint, welcome to the show.
It's great to be here.
So, Clint, as someone who has studied the presentation of history, and specifically Black history, how would you characterize this administration's approach?
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Chapter 3: What examples illustrate the pushback against Black history education?
I think we are witnessing an administration working with an unsettling intensity to attempt to distort, erase, manipulate the history of this country, and within that, manipulate the history of Black Americans' role, contributions. and experiences in America. And what I mean by that is I think, you know, let's take slavery, for example.
The president of the United States said that the Smithsonian Museum, for example, spends too much time talking about how bad slavery was. For me, my sense of things is that it is not the case that this administration believe slavery didn't happen or not even that they believe that slavery wasn't bad.
I think they understand that it was bad, but what happens is if you talk honestly about the horror and the brutality and the cruelty of what slavery was, you then have to talk about how the residue of that system continues to inform the contemporary landscape of inequality today.
And I think it would fundamentally reorient people's relationship to not only the history of this country, but the contemporary reality of this country. And that's something that I think that so many folks in this administration want to avoid because they want to be able to tell themselves that the America that they believe to be true, the America that exists today, is one that...
that is the result singularly of people's hard work or deservingness when there's obviously another story to be told there.
And what is that desire about? Because Adam, Trump talks about wanting monuments to be uplifting, not to cause people shame. What does that mean?
Yeah, I think, so when you think about the idea of uplifting, right, it's sort of this notion of celebrating the positives of someone's character, right? So as to say, George Washington was the founder of the nation,
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Chapter 4: Why is there a need to rethink Black History Month this year?
and, you know, led the revolution, was one of the greatest men of his time. And if you do that and you sort of say this clean history of George Washington without the additional stories, right? The fact that George Washington rotated his enslaved workers from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon in Virginia so that they would not earn their liberty under Pennsylvania law, right?
Because after six months, you started to get your freedom. And so If you start to add that complicating narrative, it doesn't paint this sort of clean image of our leaders.
And that just feels bad?
So there are a couple of things that that does, right? When you start to question one of the decisions, it also makes you question the other things, right? If you start to say, well, this person that we've painted as someone who did an unqualified good did also unqualified bads.
And I think the other part of this, too, is that if you have to tell a new story about Washington and you begin to tell a new story about Jefferson, that includes the sort of unsavory, so to speak, parts of their legacy, which is to say the more honest parts of their legacy. If you have to tell a new story about these men, it also means you have to tell a new story about America's founding.
If you have to tell a new story about America's founding, it means you have to tell a new story about this country. And for many Americans, if you have to tell a new story about America, it means you have to tell a new story about yourself.
And that taps into something that is like existential, that serves as a catalyst to like a fundamental crisis of identity, because who people believe they are is consciously and subconsciously tied to a story of America that they have been told over the course of generations through school, through family, through community.
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Chapter 5: How do personal stories influence the understanding of Black history?
And when you untether them from that notion of reality that they've come to believe, it's incredibly jarring.
Yeah, I can see it's disorienting. I feel like we need to ground this conversation in a few examples. You started by using the word intensity. Of the things that the Trump administration has done, which one has stuck out to you? Just give us a few examples.
Yeah, there are a handful, right? It's the renaming of Confederate memorials and Confederate monument. It is the U.S. Naval Academy removing books from their library. It's the Air Force stripping back the teaching of the Tuskegee Airmen. And actually, one of the things that Clint was saying about people having to reassess their own legacies, right?
I remember we had a conversation about his book where he was saying, you know, if you are having to ask questions about the ways that your grandparents, right, the people who took you fishing and the people who, you know, you sat on their laps and they read books to you when you were younger and you have all of these great memories of them.
If you have to reassess how they got to do the things that they got to do, then it really does, like... jar you and makes you fundamentally reassess your own sort of standing in the world.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of the recent ruling regarding historical exhibits?
And so this sort of broader project of saying, well, if we pare back some of the things that the Tuskegee Airmen had to do to become the Tuskegee Airmen, right, Black History Month sort of calls us to remember that these great people did great things, but the question is, like, why did they have to do those great things? Why did Jackie Robinson have to integrate baseball?
Why did Martin Luther King have to deliver his speech at the March on Washington, right? It is because the nation did not have this clean story of progress.
Clint, I'm curious to put this in some kind of context. What the Trump administration is doing now, which you described as having a certain degree of intensity, versus previous eras in American history, versus Trump won, because there's always a push and pull. I mean, I imagine countries rarely do just clean memorialization of their sins, you know?
Yeah. You know, what's interesting is that this is the pushback against Black progress, Black history. That in and of itself is not new. What scholars of Black history and historians talk about all the time is that in moments in which there are periods of Black social, political, and economic progress— there is often pushback to that progress.
So after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, there was obviously an intense sort of pushback to the progress that was made following the Civil War through Reconstruction. Then after the Civil Rights Movement, there was an intense pushback.
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Chapter 7: How does the conversation around historical figures like George Washington evolve?
And what we're seeing now is a pushback to much of the era of both Barack Obama's presidency, but then later the Black Lives Matter movement, which sort of intensified following the murder of George Floyd.
But it is important to note that even while we are experiencing the echoes of this history and we're experiencing the sort of nature of the sort of cyclical elements that are there, this also is a pretty unique iteration of it in the way that it is Like in the context of the civil rights movement, there was intense pushback or even during the civil rights movement, right?
So much of the pushback, you know, it would come from states and it would come from extrajudicial forces. But it was, you know, what the civil rights leaders were appealing to was the federal government to come and protect them.
Oh, that is so important. I get that. So what you're saying is mostly the pushback is cultural, like it's cultural. It comes from state governments. But this is completely top down.
Oftentimes, yeah, I don't think that we have seen a level of antagonism from the federal government who historically said,
You know, the federal government or the Supreme Court in the context of the Warren Court have been the thing that allowed Black folks to have some sort of support outside of the context of their specific geographic and political reality in a certain state or in a certain community. And that now is gone. There is no federal government to appeal to.
In fact, the federal government is the antagonist.
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Chapter 8: What legacy does Jesse Jackson leave behind in the context of Black history?
After the break, is it time to start practicing Black History Month differently?
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
So given everything you both have said, which is we're in this unusual position where the federal government is the major actor in, what do we want to call it, distorting, whitewashing history? Both. Pritifying history? Any of those? It's Black History Month, which is this month, in this year, in this moment. Is there an argument for thinking of or practicing Black History Month differently?
You know, I've been thinking a lot about this. I was recently in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and I bring my kids. I'm from New Orleans. That's my hometown. My parents still live there.
Happy Fat Tuesday.
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