Trump's effort to hide slavery tales

The New York Times  - In March, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at purging federal parks and museums of displays that cast American history “in a negative light.” In May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum enforced that order with his own directive to eliminate depictions at Park Service sites “that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

The intent seems clear. Mr. Trump aims to sand down — if not altogether erase — some of the more inglorious episodes of American history, particularly those involving racial and ethnic subjugation, to feed the ravenous maw of white grievance that fuels so much of today’s political discourse. This, of course, is antihistorical in every sense, a betrayal of the discipline’s most fundamental purpose: to learn from the past. If we ever aspire again to become one nation, the entirety of our past, including the enslavement of an estimated 10 million people, must be acknowledged as our shared history.

Under the administration’s directives, officials at all 433 National Park Service installations and other Interior Department holdings face a mid-September deadline to scrub exhibits, signs, films and bookstores of statements and literature deemed to be out of compliance. The president’s order, which also targets the Smithsonian Institution, makes clear that race is the focus of his cultural and political crusade to exorcise so-called wokeness from the body politic. Any lingering doubt was surely extinguished by his social media post taking the Smithsonian to task for, in his view, unduly focusing on “how bad Slavery was.”