Every single day that President Donald Trump is back in office is sure to be another day where white people in power are forcing an agenda to rewrite America’s racist history in a way that leaves out all the racism. In other words, MAGA-fied miseducators have gone from declaring that America is not a racist country to blatantly manipulating and mangling historical facts to show that it never has been a racist country.
According to The Washington Post, the National Park Service has quietly edited the part of its website that covers the Underground Railroad in a way that characterizes it as some colorblind “Kumbaya” nonsense as opposed to the organized network of escape routes for enslaved Black people to evade white oppression. The NPS also essentially omitted from its teaching of the Underground Railroad key references to and quotes from Harriet Tubman, which would be like presenting a new version of the Holy Bible that leaves out references to that one brown guy who was born from a virgin and performed a bunch of miracles.
From the Post:
For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.
Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.
The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.
Oh, word — so this is what we’re doing now?
So, in an effort to protect white people from their own delicate feelings, white conservatives are minimizing Tubman’s role in the Underground Railroad and grossly inflating the roles of white abolitionists, a minuscule percentage of abolitionists during slavery and the Civil War and an even more minuscule percentage of the white population during that era.
If the Underground Railroad was an organization of “Black/White cooperation” that “bridged the divides of race,” then slavery was a two-and-a-half-century-long, inter-generational unpaid internship for Black people provided by white people who were just trying to teach us a trade or two. (You can laugh, but that’s essentially what they’re teaching in Florida.)
The NPS didn’t stop at reimagining the Underground Railroad as a race-mixing utopia where everyone is invited to the colorblind cookout, it also removed a reference to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the return of escaped enslaved people to the Caucasian kidnappers who legally owned them. The Post also noted several edits on the website that “softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past” by changing text from “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers,” removing a page about “the life of Benjamin Franklin and his relationship with slavery,” and eliminating the phrases “systemic racism and historical bias” from the stories of Black soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Mind you, the changes to the NPS website comes on the heels of Trump’s latest bid to rewrite American history by taking a metaphorical white-out pen to all references to systemic racism (*gestures toward literally all of American history*), which targeted the Smithsonian Institution and, specifically, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which the Trump administration baselessly accused of teaching “improper ideology.”
It’s likely that the NPS changed its website in anticipation of Trump’s continued effort to make Black history white fragility-friendly again by weaponizing the federal government to enforce the comfortable lie at the expense of the inconvenient truth.
Sad.
