Trump's "patriotic education", aka, white-supremacist propaganda

Kali Holloway has a useful description of how rightwing historical revisionism works in the US. She uses a statue to Benjamin Tillman (1847-1918) of South Carolina, one of the most rancid white racist politicians in American history, as an example. (American History Is Getting Whitewashed, Again The Nation 10/01/2020)

The South Carolina legislature had a statue of Tillman set up on the state Capitol grounds in 1940, "where it remains, a message of white power and racial terrorism sent straight from the state government."

Tillman explains:

The back draft of historical revisionism always explodes when movements for social justice threaten to upset the status quo. The Tillman statue went up just as the NAACP was fighting for laws against lynching around the United States and as Black demands for basic civil rights were swelling. We are facing a similar moment today. In reaction to protests against racism and the removal of white supremacist statuary across the country, Donald Trump has launched a deliberate effort to suppress and sanitize America’s history. He has derided The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay series that examines the way slavery has shaped every American institution (and which he has definitely not read), likening it to anti-American propaganda and calling it “ideological poison” that “will destroy our country.” He has attacked the teaching of critical race theory as a “form of child abuse” and demeaned it as “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” The president has pledged to withhold federal funds from schools that incorporate the 1619 Project into their curricula and has demanded the cancellation of racial sensitivity trainings for federal employees, directing agencies to halt spending on programs that examine white privilege. According to a tweet from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump “has asked people to report any sightings” of critical race theory. Recently, Trump announced that he is launching the 1776 Commission, which will “promote patriotic education” and “teach our children about the miracle of American history.” [my emphasis]

Trump, of course, has no actual idea what "critical race theory" actually is, only that his white supremacist supporters and advisers like Stephen Miller say it's bad.

Holloway gives a gloomy polemic about the dominant narrative of American history, and ends on a oddly fatalistic note:

Trump and his supporters are waging a bitter fight against racial progress. They believe American history is proprietary, and their birthright includes selectively retelling. He recently admitted as much. “We grew up with a certain history, and now they’re trying to change our history,” he stated. “That's why they want to take down our monuments. That's why they want to take down our statues.” That effort ties him to the slavery apologists, Confederate sympathizers, and historical revisionists who preceded him. Proving the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same. [my emphasis]

There is an important difference between fundamental criticism of an historical period and the recognition of the inevitably contradictory interests and perspectives that have shaped a society over a longer period of time. We have a Constitution in the US that dates back to 1789 and political traditions heavily rooted in the experiences of the colonial period and in European (especially British) political institutions and ideas. So that past is still present in substantial ways, for good and bad.

There are also a variety of historical narratives: official ones promoted by the government, scholarly perspectives, popular mythology. Heather Cox Richardson in her work like How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) and the related YouTube lecture series, describes how some major historical narratives about American history developed in the context of a society in which freedom for some really has depended on the unfreedom of others. She gives a fascinating account, for instance, of the way the image of the frontier individualist embodied in the Western cowboy was shaped and integrated by the anti-Reconstruction ideology shaped by class and racial agendas.

In the case of the historical narrative of the role of African-Americans in the US, there were always competing narratives, not only in terms of real-time politics but also in larger historical narratives. For instance, even during the long decades that some version of the Lost Cause ideology of the Civil War and Reconstruction dominated even academic institutions, there were always competing narratives. The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), to take one example, provided alternative scholarly accounts beginning in 1916.

Holloway's closing comment about "the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same," seems to imply a circular cycle of historical development with which I wouldn't be comfortable. But the context she provides for Trump's "patriotic education” notion is really helpful. That project is yet another attempt to sponsor an ideological, dishonest white supremacist view of American history.