GOP Grills Smithsonian Director Over Exhibits On Black History

It should be comforting (for white supremacists) to know that with all that is going on in the U.S. and the world, GOP lawmakers are still working hard to address an issue that wasn’t an issue until President Donald Trump and his MAGA machine took over conservative politics and the Republican Party: wokeness at the Smithsonian.

On Tuesday, House Republicans grilled National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig during the House’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, a branch of DOGE that is chaired by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), according to NPR. Conservative lawmakers who are not historians, educators or biologists spent their time beating Hartig over the head with questions about educational depictions of Black history, as well as questions about gender and biology, because, you guessed it, some exhibits feature trans people.

Basically, a bunch of ideologues who use their positions as lawmakers to force right-wing ideology on the academic world were accusing the museum director, and by extension virtually all federally funded museum directors, of being ideologues who are pushing “woke ideology” on anyone who voluntarily buys a museum ticket.

From NPR:

In his opening remarks, Burchett said: “I feel like [the Smithsonian]’s become infected by a woke ideology that seeped into public displays, educational materials and planning documents. The American story is the birth and growth of a great nation founded on powerful ideals and which we aim to fully achieve. But in the museum’s current telling, history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.”

In a 162-page report issued on July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian museum of being “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

The council faulted the National Museum of American History on a multitude of fronts, saying it underemphasized the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history; was not sufficiently celebratory of the country’s 250th anniversary; and that it engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien” and transgender activism. It also accused the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming and teaching resources.

In March of last year, Trump signed an executive order, titled the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which the White House claimed was an order aimed at correcting “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history,” which, as I noted previously, “only goes to show that when it comes to this administration, every accusation is actually a confession.”

But Trump signed his little EO and immediately began forcing African American history museums to remove exhibits related to slavery and the civil rights movement, having his white attorneys decide how much Black history is too much Black history, and pushing right-wing curricula that whitewash American history to omit anti-Black oppression, or spin it into a wrong that America worked tirelessly to right. The Trump administration has also made numerous attempts to purge any Black history that makes white people uncomfortable (*gestures widely towards literally all fact-based Black American history that is told truthfully*) from national parks across the country, although federal judges have ordered the National Park Service to restore most of it.

Before all of this, Republicans had never been vocal critics of the Smithsonian, indicating that, once again, congressional Republicans are just following their MAGA messiah’s marching orders. That being said, the white conservative inability to let Black stories be told unfettered — because those stories hurt their fragile, white feelings and challenge their understanding of American exceptionalism — is obviously nothing new.

For a shining example of this, look no further than Florida, where the state’s Board of Education implemented new educational standards that require teachers to teach that enslaved people benefited from their enslavement because it taught them skills, and that Black people also committed acts of violence during anti-Black race massacres like Tulsa and Ocoee. The board’s members also previously expressed concerns that an AP studies course didn’t offer any “opposing viewpoints” or “other perspectives” of slavery, specifically, that the course “may only present one side of this issue” and “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity,” which, of course, accurately describes exactly what the transatlantic slave trade was.

So, when Burchett blindly claims the Smithsonian is presenting U.S, history as “an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed,” what he’s really suggesting is that chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the genocide of the indigenous people, the women’s suffrage movement, the LGBTQ movement and every other event related to the oppression of marginalized people either be eliminated completely or taught through a lens that protects the legacies of the oppressors and the feelings of white people who want to continue viewing those oppressors as American heroes.

Anyway, Republican continued hammering Hartig on other subjects related to sex, gender, biology — mainly because conservatives hate trans people and thus, material that humanizes and relays the experiences of trans people shouldn’t exist — and about materials on white privilege and documents such as “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States,” which lawmakers spoke about mostly in footnotes that ignored the deeper context and educational framework of those materials, because they don’t have the intellectual capacity to discuss it with any kind of depth, and because too much scrutiny would probably hurt their largely rhetorical arguments.

Mind you, if the Smithsonian displayed materials that promoted white nationalism, Christian nationalism, the great replacement theory, anti-DEI narratives, or the wise and totally-not-racist words of Charlie Kirk, neither Trump nor his Republican sycophants would object. Instead, they’re objecting to museums featuring exhibits that they had featured for years before Trump and his white supremacist regime interfered and labeled it all “woke,” which is the right-wing umbrella term for everything that falls outside of the small, willfully ignorant bubble of neo-conservatism.

Anyway, before the hearing, Hartig released a two-page statement to the House subcommittee, in which she wrote the following:

“When visitors, scholars, members of Congress, veterans and teachers tell us we have gotten something wrong or only half right, we welcome the feedback; we take it seriously, and we make changes when the evidence supports them. When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we do not mean erasing it. We mean adding the evidence, voices and objects that earlier tellings left out, so that more Americans can see themselves in the national story. Examining the harder chapters of our history is not the same as hostility toward America. We can and do honor the Declaration, the Revolution, the Constitution, and our national symbols, and also tell the truth about the times the country fell short of its own founding ideals. Telling our history fully is not anti-American. It is a form of respect for the American people and a commitment to constantly be in pursuit of ‘a more perfect union.'”

Exactly. But again, these people in the GOP are not historians. Most of them aren’t scholars either. They’re bigoted, anti-intellectual ideologues who are just upset their preferred forms of indoctrination don’t dominate the culture anymore.

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