US President Reopens Debate: Was Slavery Bad?
Well, WAS it?
A week after the VERY White House officially launched its purge of dangerous wrongthink in the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, Donald Trump had a little social media meltdown Tuesday (archive link) over how the Smithsonian is anti-American and just not nice at all!!!!
We like the part where Trump claimed that “woke” has been eliminated throughout America, except in museums, although we do wonder, once it’s extirpated from those, what wingnuts will have to rail against? Probably ads with interracial couples again.
Note also Trump’s vow to send “his attorneys” to apply to museums the same kinds of threats and extortion that he’s pursued against universities, to make them submit to his agenda. Never mind that presidents aren’t museum directors or that the Smithsonian’s governance was designed to be independent from political diktats. Trump is all about ignoring limits on his power, and he must have his way.
A lot of people — America-haters like journalists and academics — pointed out that the Smithsonian has all sorts of material about Brightness and Success and even The Future across its museum displays, but they miss the point. Reality is whatever Great Leader says, and he says the Smithsonian contains nothing but how horrible our Country is and how bad Slavery was. Ergo, like children brought up according to the abusive principles of the late James Dobson, the museums must be chastised and broken until they stop misbehaving. Then MAGA Nation will all rejoice because Daddy’s home to administer a spanking to our cultural institutions.
It’s The Fascism, Stupid. Or The Stupid Fascism
Weird cultish behavior? Why would you say that about the administration that on Wednesday posted this triumphant AI image (archive link) of a cross-eyed eagle perching on a tombstone labeled “WOKE,” with Trump’s fatwa against the Smithsonian superimposed over the picture? This is all completely normal, and YOU’RE the cultist.
As you can see, the White House really thinks it has a winner here, or at least one more loud culture-war fight to soak up media airtime instead of that Jeffrey Ep-something stuff that was briefly looking so bad for Trump.
Of course Trump’s attempts to dictate how to talk about history is also highlighting his creepy fascism, right along with his military takeover of Washington DC, so we’re pretty sure even the distraction isn’t doing him much good outside the weird cult that already loves him.
No, Really, Trump Is Right! Woke And Bad Slavery Everywhere!
To keep the MAGA outrage coming, White House functionaries quickly slapped together a Thursday press release titled “President Trump Is Right About The Smithsonian.” The handout doesn’t bother with any context or even a reference to Trump’s social media post before plunging into a list of grievances that rounds up some 30 items that are supposed to prove that, as in all things, Great Leader is correct and wise.
It was an easy enough job, since rightwing media is full of things to be mad about, and the bullet points start flying with a rant about Trump’s greatest enemy, the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Oh, hey, remember how he praised the museum in 2017 for giving Americans a “meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms”? Of course, we later learned in a memoir by the museum’s then-director Lonnie Bunch III, who now heads the entire Smithsonian, that Trump wasn’t a happy history camper at all.
Prior to the tour, Bunch wrote, aides told him that Trump “was in a foul mood and that he did not want to see anything ‘difficult,’ ” so could he please not focus too much on that stuff? Trump seemed cordial enough, especially when he saw something shiny he could be happy about, Bunch wrote:
The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. […] As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.” All I could say was let’s continue walking.
Seriously, why didn’t the museum at least update the discussion of the slave trade to note that people in the Netherlands love Trump? Even if that’s another lie, it’s a small price to pay for keeping its funding.
Ah, but we digress. Or maybe we don’t digress, and that was simply The Weave! As we say, the White House’s Smithsonian Burn Book starts by targeting the National Museum of African American History and Culture, although hilariously, none of the complaints about that museum involve how it only discusses how bad slavery was. But the staffers did find some Bad Slavery mentions in two other museums.
The rant leads off with several gripes about online-only materials about “whiteness” that the NMAAHC already pulled in 2020 when Trump and rightwing media had conniptions about them in his first term. Another now-removed webpage on “being anti-racist” contains, we’re told, “content from hardcore woke activist Ibram X. Kendi.” Again, these items haven’t been online outside digital archive sites for several years, but that’s no reason not to stay mad about them. Like the corpses of medieval heretics, they must be dug up so they can be tortured and burned again.
And as with so many rightwing expeditions aimed at fishing for outrage, some of the items in the net are more puzzling than shockingly woke. Why are we supposed to be angry that “The National Portrait Gallery commissioned a “stop-motion drawing animation” that “examines the career” of Anthony Fauci, exactly? Oh, right, he’s Public Health Enemy #1. Shame! Shame! Not mentioned, of course, is that the work was paid for by a dedicated endowment, not The US Taxpayers, but it’s still a war crime.
Oh Yeah, The Bad Slavery Everywhere! In Two (2) Exhibits
As for the supposedly pervasive presence of “how bad slavery was” across the many collections in the Smithsonian, the handout finds two (2) examples, and lies about both. We’re told that
The National Museum of the American Latino characterizes the Texas Revolution as a “massive defense of slavery waged by ‘white Anglo Saxon’ settlers against anti-slavery Mexicans fighting for freedom, not a Texan war of independence from Mexico.”
You have to follow the link to see that the quoted passage here, with the exception of “white Anglo settlers” is not from the museum at all, but from one section of a tendentious article in The Federalist last week claiming that the Smithsonian’s American History Museum is “wall-to-wall anti-American propaganda.” One must wonder: Did some aide tell Trump about the article, prompting his rant Tuesday? Quite a few of the examples in the press release are cribbed from it.
But you would also have to read that Federalist article to learn that the National Museum of the American Latino hasn’t been built yet, although the dangerous content of the one display is on preview at the American history museum. For extra surrealism, the bit about the Latino exhibit in the Federalist piece is based in part on a 2022 Heritage Foundation screed.
We didn’t have all day to look through the actual museum exhibit’s website, so we didn’t actually find the supposedly inflammatory description of the Texas Revolution. But there was a lot of identity politics to complain about, since that museum is going to be all about Latinos, and how is that Woke DEI stuff even legal in America?
But also, for what it’s (fort) worth, hell yes, the Texas revolution was fought in part to preserve slavery after the Mexican government outlawed it in 1829. That’s not woke, that’s just history. We suppose Trump will now have to sic “his attorneys” on the Texas State Historical Association to send those pesky facts down the memory hole.
The press release’s other horrifying example of Nothing But How Bad Slavery Was is also a lie, complaining that
The American History Museum’s exhibit about Benjamin Franklin focuses almost solely on slavery, directing visitors to learn more about his “electrical experiments and the enslaved people of his household,” noting his “scientific accomplishments were enabled by the social and economic system he worked within.”
This, again, badly garbles content from the Federalist piece, which contends that a visitor “cannot get two sentences into an exhibit about the scientific works of Benjamin Franklin without being bombarded, at every single turn, with mentions of slavery.” But of course, the article is fibbing, and even admits that the discussion of Franklin and slavery at the museum itself is contained in a standalone web essay that a visitor to the museum will only encounter if they use their smartphone to read a QR code. That’s some bombardment! Seriously, if you read through the web version of the Franklin exhibit, you won’t find slavery mentioned outside the introductory text and the essay itself. Oh, and in the sidebar links to the slavery essay, so we suppose the White House can complain slavery is on every page of the website — as a link.
The essay itself is an evenhanded discussion of Franklin’s complex relationship to slavery, noting that Franklin was able to retire from his career as a printer largely because part of his wealth was built through the labor of enslaved people, and that he dabbled a bit in selling people. Once he didn’t have to continue working as a printer, he had time and leisure to pursue scientific research and politics. And yes, the essay explains that while he eventually became a staunch abolitionist in his politics and writing, “during his lifetime he never emancipated any of the people he enslaved.” It’s very much the sort of mainstream historical view of Franklin you’d find in Walter Isaacson’s 2003 Franklin biography (where I first learned that Franklin wasn’t nearly the boozer and womanizer I’d been led to believe).
How Bad Slavery Was: Far Worse Than Anything Trump Bitched About
As historians were quick to point out, whether white Christian Nationalists like it or not, slavery was integral to the founding and the history of this nation (and hell, to its early economic growth, in both the North and South). And it was, like so many examples of the cruelty humans can get up to, incredibly, almost unimaginably bad. As historians Henry Snow and Thomas Lecaque write at Dame, when Trump and the Right complain about “woke,” what they really object to is “being clear on the actual, genuine, unending horror that was slavery.”
Behind Trump’s yelling at the Smithsonian is the same fantasy that’s destroying universities, mandating white supremacist history: a vision of a fascist America, the mythohistory and nostalgia that bolsters the White Christian Nation his followers fantasize about. And nothing shatters that paternalistic, Lost Cause–esque, Jim Crow–era White feel-good racism like actually dealing with slavery. Because “how bad Slavery was” is worse. Much worse. Worse than you imagine, worse than you learn, worse than even the museums can depict.
They go on to remind readers of those horrors, in more detail than we’ll discuss here, including the terrors of the Middle Passage, the cruelty of Jamaica’s sugar plantations, which somehow managed to be far worse than later American cotton plantations, and of course the pervasive sexual abuse and violence inflicted on enslaved women, and sometimes men, from rape (often enforced with the threat that resistance would bring death or being sold). It’s a harrowing read.
But the Smithsonian and other accurate depictions of American history also make clear that the story of slavery is also a story of resistance and resilience, as enslaved people “took care of each other and tried to free themselves despite constant violence.” If anything, as Trump might have remembered if he weren’t himself a fascist asshole and incurable racist, the African American History and Culture museum is a narrative of triumph and, yes, Brightness. It begins with slavery, but the top floors are about Black Americans who have made it in America — not only the Civil Rights movement, but also Chuck Berry’s red Eldorado, movie directors who shaped American culture, the Harlem Renaissance, all of it.
Journalist Jonathan M. Katz put it quite nicely:
Literally the point of every Smithsonian exhibition is “look how great America is.” Even if the beginning and middle are “look at how shitty we used to be,” they always end on, “and look and how great we became as a result!”
Fascists don’t like being reminded of that, either.
[NYT (gift link) / Encyclopedia Virginia / White House / Federalist / Texas State Historical Association / Dame / Encyclopedia Virginia]
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Quick note on that painting, which knocked me flat when I saw it — presented with only the barest acquisition information — on the African American History museum's website, in a section on slavery in the colonies.
https://www.searchablemuseum.com/the-chesapeake-making-race/
I really haven't been able to find much about it either, but as I mention in the caption, it's also featured prominently in Encyclopedia Virginia's entry on sexual exploitation of enslaved people, which is itself an amazing, disheartening read.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/sexual-exploitation-of-the-enslaved/
But also ALSO, that essay includes this amazing excerpt from the diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose writing was a big part of Ken Burns's "The Civil War." Writing about just how common plantation owners' rapes of enslaved women were, she said:
“Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”
Satire and wit went for the jugular back then.
That painting, wow