Trump's Patriotic Education Initiative Is Just More White Supremacy
Forcing people to love America through a white-washed, historically-inaccurate version of history does not work
In the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the president was asked why he ended racial sensitivity training at federal agencies. Here’s his full response:
“I ended it because it’s racist.”
He also calls the program “insane,” “radical,” and “revolutionary.”
This is not new rhetoric by any means, labeling something that is inherently anti-racist as racist—nor is it a line of thinking that is exclusive to Donald Trump. Over the years I have spoken to many white Americans who are vehemently opposed to the idea that we should reckon with the brutality and inequities of the past and present.
Much of this reticence has to do with discomfort. The status quo is quite a comfortable place for many white Americans. It’s a place discovered by the brave explorer Christopher Columbus and founded by skim milk-hued deities who were the most brilliant and perfect humans one could ever imagine. It’s the land of opportunity, the land of the free. Nationalism was/is woven directly into our education. In many schools around the country, we literally pledge an allegiance to the flag every morning. In Alabama, as of 2019, it is required that all K-12 schools say the pledge each day.
It’s also a place where one’s white skin has never really been a deterrent or a concern. In a vacuum, there would be nothing wrong with that, of course, but what people fail to realize is that the elevation and freedom of white skin is directly connected to the disparagement, constraint, and violence against black skin. These are not two separate ideas. When a society elevates a certain indelible aesthetic characteristic, such as skin color, it automatically devalues the others.
Our white-washed education feeds into this elevation, and President Trump wants it to stay that way. In a speech on September 17th, he said that, “left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” In the same speech he also blamed Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, the 1619 Project, and the left a few more times before announcing a grant that will, “support the development of a pro-American curriculum,” and that he’s signing an executive order “establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education. It will be called the 1776 Commission.”
Howard Zinn—with the People’s History of the United States and other work—and the New York Times’ 1619 Project tried to shed light on the various atrocities committed by the powerful and venerated figures of America’s past in order for us to address them in the open air and learn from them. The president doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want honesty in education; he wants nationalism. He wants propaganda. He wants to preserve the status quo at all costs, and it is a status quo that was built on, and still adheres to, the notion of white superiority and supremacy. Hiding the truth is another tool to quell dissent and keep things spinning along at the same rate.
Trump wants everyone to love America as an unblemished image of perfection. He doesn’t want any monuments removed, any names changed at military bases. He wants to view historical figures as if they are one-dimensional comic book heroes. But they’re not. And we are not perfect, far from it. More people would love America if America would start being more honest and open.
This country was founded on stolen land. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. There were people already living here. And we cannot simply move past that, 250 years of chattel slavery, and 100 years of Jim Crow and segregation because we never reckoned with those atrocities. Reconstruction never happened. We continue to plunder Native American land.
The horrors of the past are still reverberating, in very real and significant ways, through our county today. White supremacy has gradations. It might not be quite as brazen as 50 years ago, but it’s still everywhere. A school in Georgia just desegregated its prom in 2014. We were on our 6th generation of iPhone in 2014. This isn’t ancient history.
If Malcolm X was alive today he would be 95.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 91.
Emmett Till would be 79.
Fred Hampton would be 72.
Fortunately there are many people in this country pushing for reeducation and reconstruction now. And they’re gaining ground, which is scaring people like Donald Trump. It is scaring those who have thrived in an unequal system, those who have subscribed wholeheartedly to the perpetually glimmering image of American magnificence. We need to listen and support the people telling the whole truth, not the ones mandating blind worship.
If we want more people to love America, we have to work to make it a place that more people can love. Pushing nationalistic fallacies will only take us further away from that goal.
We cannot run away from our past—or our present.
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Thank you Jesse
Great article, speaks volume. It’s difficult to unlearn what we’ve learned, but it’s possible to renew the brain and relearn the truth.