"WTF? Our National Archives are removing displays and information about MLK, Native Americans, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, unions, birth control, and the American internment of Japanese during WWII because it may upset Republican legislators. When US Archivist Colleen Shogan was grilled by the Senate during her confirmation, neofascist Josh Hawley called her a Democratic “extremist” and warned her that he and other Republicans “would be watching closely for signs that she was pulling the independent agency to the left.” Looks like this effort to “work the refs” is succeeding. Most recently, a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. was replaced by a picture of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley, pictures of the camps where we interred Japanese-ancestry US citizens were taken down, references to the coal industry causing environmental hazards were removed, and Shogan “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” They even removed a picture of Republican President Jerry Ford’s wife Betty because she was wearing an Equal Rights Amendment button, and in the display of “patents that changed the world” the birth control pill was replaced with the bump stock that turns semi-automatic weapons into functionally fully-automatic machine guns. This “obeying fascists in advance” is beyond the pale, and hopefully now that it’s getting some publicity Shogan will reconsider bowing to the GOP’s white supremacist base."
Original story in Current Affairs
As a retired school teacher I can comfortably admit now I definitely taught the CRT version of US history while teaching high school social studies and english classes for nearly a quarter century, as I gathered did most my colleagues in blue bubble Seattle. And probably would have been banned or hounded in many parts of the country today for doing so. But not everybody even in my blue city approved of teaching the conflicts. Some wanted a more celebratory, rah rah, version of US history taught, with less emphasis on the conflicts and discrimination and more emphasis on our national glory, etc. It was a divide, again, even in a blue city, with people that still did not get that America's development because of its democratic opportunities and diversity were in fact its greatest achievement. I know bigots don't want to hear any of this. And I know to some this just sounds like more Kumbaya multiculturalism but, yes, along with our imperialist arrogance, and our militarism, our multicultural democratic opportunities, however flawed and shorted, are a defining distinguishing feature of our national identity around the world. It's our soft superpower. Erasing that history will not make us stronger but weaker. And it is, again, on the ballot in this election.
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