Decoded: Keisha Blain On The Erasure Of Black History

Professor Keisha Blain explains how the federal government is being weaponized to continually erase Black History from public spaces.

White people have always been a little sensitive when it comes to Black history. They love the mythology of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, but they don’t want to get too into the weeds about the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade. They know Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, but don’t want to address the horrifying reality of Jim Crow and segregation. Keisha Blain, professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University, explains how the truth of Black History is under attack in “Decoded.”

“By not talking about certain aspects of the history, they’re able to avoid it, they’re able to pretend that nothing wrong has occurred, and therefore they can live their lives without the feeling of shame and guilt,” Blain explains in the video. “I think it’s important to remember the way we tell our history is very political.”

Throughout the second Trump administration, we’ve seen how politics can be weaponized to manufacture a whitewashed version of history that doesn’t make people too uncomfortable. “When people say that African American history is being erased right now, they are talking about efforts, largely led by the federal government, to remove any kind of public representation that centers the voice and experiences in the United States,” Blain says.

Within months of his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, which explicitly changes how American history is presented in national parks and museums. In the year since Trump signed the order, references to Black soldiers were removed from the Arlington National Cemetery, the Pentagon no longer recognizes Black History Month or MLK Day, and just last month, the National Park Service removed an exhibit about the slaves George Washington owned from the President’s House in Philadelphia.

Blain highlights the hypocrisy inherent in these moves. These are the very same people who were telling us we needed to “preserve history” when it comes to Confederate monuments, who are leading an effort to erase monuments to Black History.

“We should not play these kinds of games where we, for example, recognize the importance of monuments at one particular moment and then turn around to say we shouldn’t have certain monuments,” Blain says. “If we believe that monuments are important, then it means we should allow spaces where we talk about slavery, or we honor people of African descent, especially if we’re going to make a case that we should honor Confederate leaders.”

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Decoded: Keisha Blain On The Erasure Of Black History was originally published on newsone.com