Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
A statue of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stands in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, June 30, 2021.
Donald Trump is giving whitewashing a bad name.
His executive order of last Thursday directed Vice President Vance, who’s a member of the Smithsonian’s board, and budget director Russell Vought “to ensure that future appropriations to the Smithsonian Institution prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement,” Trump continued, “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology … It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage.”
To that end, in the same executive order, Trump also instructed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” and to “take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.”
For the sake of brevity, let’s skip over the distortions of American history inherent in ignoring such unpleasantries as slavery, the Oriental Exclusion Act, the Japanese mass internment of World War II, colonial witch burnings, lynchings, laws enforcing racial segregation, State Department policies that turned away Jews seeking to escape Nazi Germany, that sort of thing. (Good thing Vance isn’t also on the board of the Holocaust Museum.) Let’s just focus on Trump’s professed opposition to “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and his directions to Burgum, in the very same executive order, to rebuild and reinstate the statues of Confederate military and political leaders.
There are no figures in American history who personified “divisive, race-centered ideology” more completely than those leaders, who broke the nation apart and inflicted on the American people the bloodiest war in our history entirely in the cause of that ideology. The animating, foundational principle of the Confederacy ran counter to the beliefs of the Founders, according to the March 1861 “Cornerstone Speech” of Alexander Stephens, soon to become the Confederacy’s vice president. Despite Thomas Jefferson’s toleration of slavery, Stephens declared, “The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.”
“Our new government,” Stephens continued, “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
To be sure, you might interpret that as a divisive, race-centered ideology, and it was certainly the ideology in whose service the Confederate generals whose statues Trump has ordered reinstalled directed armies that killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers. But since Trump has ordered the eradication of race-centered ideology, I guess the Confederate cause wasn’t race-centered after all. (Should any of you believe the South seceded in the name of states’ rights, I refer you to the Confederate Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Subsection 4, which tells both the Confederacy’s congress and its member states that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”)
And since our president opposes race-centered ideology, there can’t be a scintilla of that in Trump’s decision to shut down all refugee resettlement programs save the one he has created for the white Afrikaners of South Africa. On his first day back in the White House, Trump suspended refugee resettlement for people fleeing for their lives from such nations as the Congo and Afghanistan (in the latter, some of whom had aided our forces there at considerable risk to themselves). The threat to the Afrikaners, who once ruled their country through the system of apartheid, though roughly 90 percent of their nation was either Black or Asian, isn’t immediately apparent: They are subjected to violent crime at the same rate as the population at large. Nor are they streaming for the exits: As Ernst Roets, the former executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, which lobbies for Afrikaners within South Africa, told The New York Times, “I don’t know anyone—no one I’m aware of—that plans to move to America.”
Squaring such circles as Trump’s opposition to race-centered ideology and his support for Confederate statuary and Afrikaner immigration shouldn’t be all that hard, once you understand that “race-centered” does not and cannot mean “white-centered.” “White,” in Trumpworld, means “normal”; hence, acceptable to all. Any other race, accordingly, is abnormal; hence, divisive. I hope this pointer will prove helpful in decoding further Trump executive orders.
