Erasure Is Violence: Trump, The Blacksonian and the War on Truth

To erase our story is to erase our citizenship. This is more than censorship. This is violence.

The first time I walked into the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., my eyes welled with tears before I ever laid them on a single exhibit. I stood on the escalator descending into the depths of the place, and a weight settled squarely on my shoulders. A speaker mounted high above played a spiritual I’d heard a thousand times but never knew by name.

All around me, Black families—grandmothers in pearls, fathers holding small hands, women in sisterhood, young brothers in Greek letter gear—moved in a slow procession. A caravan of sweet, beautiful Blackness. Some were excited. Some anxious. Some wore smiles stretched wide like butterfly wings in flight. Among us were white folks too—teachers with shaggy-haired students, bookish older couples, and curious tourists. An intentional dash of cream in our coffee.

But as we descended deeper, the mood began to shift. Smiles faded. Excitement gave way to something heavier. On the lowest level began our story, our American origin story. The transatlantic trade in human beings. The exploitation of flesh and farmland. Shackles and sugarcane. Hell and harvest. Terror and tobacco. How we lived, how we died, and how a nation built by and for a young white supremacist society profited from both.

And still, amid the horror, there were bright streaks of our humanity. Our resistance. Our fragile yet fertile two-ness. Our fight for abolition, for democracy, for dignity. As the exhibits climbed through time, from slavery into freedom, through Reconstruction and the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, into hip-hop, sports, politics, and Black enterprise, the darkness lifted. Floor by floor, we rose. And by the time we reached the top, we had moved from bondage into triumph. Through struggle and war, with the help of some allies, and our own unshakable will, we didn’t just become “American.” We became, perhaps, the truest believers in America.

This is our America, too.
This is our story. And few institutions have reflected, preserved, and elevated that story more powerfully than the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

History is how a people keep count—of their wounds, their triumphs, their survival. When a government orders that history to be rewritten, erased, or silenced, it is not simply censorship. It is violence.

On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It targets the Smithsonian Institution and takes direct aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the second most visited museum in the entire system as recently as 2022. The order accuses the museum of promoting a “divisive, race-centered ideology” and criticizes exhibits that allegedly characterize values like “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” as aspects of “white culture.”

It goes further. The order empowers Vice President J.D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to oversee the removal of what it calls “improper ideology.” It threatens future funding for the museum unless exhibits deemed to “divide Americans based on race” are removed.

What’s at stake isn’t just money or programming. It’s truth, memory, and the soul of Black America. This directive could lead to significant underfunding for educational institutions dedicated to Black history. It could erase the very stories that so many of us—and this country—need to remember.

This. Is. Violence.

Silencing history isn’t an intellectual debate. It’s a violent act that cuts through generations. When institutions are pressured to remove or sanitize exhibits that confront the truths of slavery, segregation, redlining, or police brutality, the lived experiences of Black Americans are erased. And not just our wounds—but our ingenuity, our intellect, our contributions, our triumphs.

Erasure dehumanizes by omission. When Black history is pushed out of the national narrative, it sends a clear message: that Black people are not central to the American story. And it’s not only about memory. It’s about justice. When we lose the truth, we lose the chance to reckon, to repair, to heal. It’s weaponized gaslighting. Psychological warfare at a national scale.

And it has real-world consequences. When injustice is erased or minimized, the systems built on it remain unchallenged. Underfunded schools, over-policed communities, neglected hospitals, entrenched poverty, all of it thrives in the absence of truth. And at the root of it all is ignorance, a cultivated, manufactured ignorance that kills. When people aren’t taught the truth about race and power in America, they are vulnerable to bias, apathy, hate and political malevolence.

It takes great violence to blind a nation to the truth of its past. It takes even greater cruelty to replace that truth with silence and expedient fiction.

That day at the Blacksonian so many years ago, I left feeling emotionally spent but spiritually and intellectually full. I watched that wave of people, young and old, coffee and cream, move through a difficult history and come out on the other side more whole, more connected, more aware.

How great might this country be, how strong, if we embraced the full story of an America that wrestled itself away from its deepest sins? How powerful might we become if we didn’t run from the blood on our hands, but instead acknowledged it, and then washed them in the wells of freedom, democracy, and truth we helped dig together?

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash