In his March 27 executive order, President Trump directed Vice President J. D. Vance to “remove improper ideology” from NMAAHC and other Smithsonian museums. As I walked around the museum, I wondered which of these exhibits would fall under that rubric. What does it mean for something to be improper if the administration’s understanding of what is acceptable excludes anything that might make white Americans feel bad? Is the statue of Thomas Jefferson surrounded by bricks inscribed with the names of people he enslaved improper? Is a slave cabin that once sat on the grounds of a plantation in South Carolina improper? Are the shackles that were once locked around the feet of enslaved children improper? Is Harriet Tubman’s silk shawl improper? Is Nat Turner’s Bible improper? Is Emmett Till’s casket improper? Are the photographs of men and women who were lynched as white audiences looked on improper?
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is not a place that traffics in improper ideology. It is a museum that recognizes that America has been suffused with improper ideologies for most of its history: ideologies that ignore the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding. Ideologies that tell us the Civil War was simply about states’ rights. Ideologies that call Reconstruction a failure rather than a campaign that was actively destroyed. Ideologies that excise the important role of queer and female activists during the civil-rights movement. Ideologies that ignore the connections between racism and incarceration. Ideologies that tell Americans that the contemporary landscape of inequality in this country has nothing to do with history, and is simply a result of who has worked hard and who has not.
Several years ago, I visited the museum with my grandparents—my grandfather, who was born in 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, and my grandmother, who was born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida. Inside, I pushed my grandfather in his wheelchair, his cane laid across his lap, a map of the museum in his hands. My grandmother walked behind us and moved ahead of us with an effortless independence, her gait steady and unhurried. I remember watching them take in the exhibits and remark upon how proximate they felt to what was on display. When I asked my grandmother about it later, she kept repeating the words I lived it. I lived it. I lived it.