The Trump administration is trying to sanitize U.S. history by removing mentions of slavery on historic monuments, scrubbing words such as “oppression” from government websites, and obscuring the legacy of Black American heroes. Last summer, the president personally criticized the Smithsonian for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was.”
The Atlantic’s Clint Smith and Adam Harris argue that if the federal government won’t reckon with the nation’s past, it might be time for a different approach to understanding Black history.
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