Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Late last month, when two federal grants to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana were rescinded, the Trump administration seemed to be following through on its promise to root out what President Trump called “improper ideology” in cultural institutions focused on Black history.
After all, the plantation’s mission was to show visitors what life was truly like for the enslaved, contrary to the watered-down Black history that the president seemed to back.
Then just as quickly, the grants were restored a few weeks later, the Whitney Plantation’s executive director said in an interview.
Because the money had already been approved, “maybe it
was an exposure for lawsuits,” the executive director, Ashley Rogers, said, “but who knows?”
Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March denouncing cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”
But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.
“The most concerning phrase that I’ve seen is ‘improper ideology,’ which sounds so Orwellian,” Ms. Rogers said. She added, “They’re couching everything as ideology, which is already odd, because what we’re talking about at Whitney Plantation is facts.”
The distortions, she said, come from “plantation museums where they do not talk about slavery, where they try to peddle you this idea that enslaved people were happy.”
When news stories claimed last week that the Smithsonian’s African American history museum had begun returning artifacts to comply with the president’s order, the Smithsonian issued a statement saying it would do no such thing.
Friday, the president’s budget singled out the government’s 400 Years of African American History Commission for elimination, “to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities.”
After all, the plantation’s mission was to show visitors what life was truly like for the enslaved, contrary to the watered-down Black history that the president seemed to back.
Then just as quickly, the grants were restored a few weeks later, the Whitney Plantation’s executive director said in an interview.
Because the money had already been approved, “maybe it
was an exposure for lawsuits,” the executive director, Ashley Rogers, said, “but who knows?”
Ever since Mr. Trump issued an executive order in March denouncing cultural institutions that were trying to “rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” sites like the Whitney Plantation have lived with such uncertainty. An order specifically targeting the Smithsonian Institution tasked Vice President JD Vance and other White House officials with “seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties.”
But reversals like the one in Louisiana and actions by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seem to indicate some misgivings about the president’s order. They also show that putting historical knowledge back into the bottle after decades of reckoning with the nation’s racist history will be more difficult than the administration believes.
“The most concerning phrase that I’ve seen is ‘improper ideology,’ which sounds so Orwellian,” Ms. Rogers said. She added, “They’re couching everything as ideology, which is already odd, because what we’re talking about at Whitney Plantation is facts.”
The distortions, she said, come from “plantation museums where they do not talk about slavery, where they try to peddle you this idea that enslaved people were happy.”
When news stories claimed last week that the Smithsonian’s African American history museum had begun returning artifacts to comply with the president’s order, the Smithsonian issued a statement saying it would do no such thing.
Friday, the president’s budget singled out the government’s 400 Years of African American History Commission for elimination, “to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities.”
