100 Years Later

On February 3, 2026, the White House issued its statement on Black History Month. It was a combination of gaslighting, fantasy, and condescending drivel. A revelation, among many, that we still haunt the dreams of some white men and women in this country.

The statement was issued against the backdrop of Trump’s attack on all things DEI, the cruelty of ICE and its charge to “make American white again,” and the administration’s attempt to redact American history.

Trump issued in March 2025 his executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to the American History,” and declared that “[o]ver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than the truth.” This order justified the attack on the Smithsonian and Secretary Lonnie Bunch. It led, among other things, to the removal of signage in Independence Mall, detailing the lives of nine enslaved persons who lived in the first president’s home in Philadelphia. Following that order, the National Park Service removed a brochure at Medgar Evers’s home. They wanted to redact the description of Byron De La Beckwith, the man who ruthlessly murdered Evers at his home, as a racist and to scrub the account of Evers laying in a pool of blood in his driveway as his wife and children looked on.

The White House statement on Black History month echoed the view of the executive order. “For decades, the progressive movement and far-left politicians have sought to needlessly divide our citizens based on race, painting a toxic and distorted and disfigured vision of our history, heritage, and heroes.” No mention of slavery or the Black freedom movement. No talk of “a more perfect union.” Only an assertion of the role – the minor bit part – Black people have played in “our grand American story.”

Donald Trump followed this statement three days later with a post on social media of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Clearly, he doesn’t care about Black American history or African Americans for that matter. He and many of the people in his administration are, and the evidence corroborates this conclusion, racist. In fact, as I have said before, white nationalists have seized control of the executive branch of our government and cruelty abounds because of it.

I keep thinking about Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year old boy in Minneapolis. I keep seeing his eyes after his release from the detention center in Texas. How these people stole his innocence. How his eyes reveal, perhaps, the dreams of a baby boy who has yet to find language for the horror he now knows so intimately. All because these people want to be white in a white Republic.

Expecting anything more from them about Black history, about us, would be a fool’s desire.

But history matters. The way we tell our stories about the past, what we choose to include and what we exclude affect our self-understanding and our moral sense. Those stories can easily malform our characters, populate the country with monsters, and blanket our imaginations with horrors.

Who and what we choose to leave out of the stories of the past reveal, all too often, the limits of our ideas of justice. Describing an entire continent dark, with no meaningful past, justified unimaginable cruelty. Declaring lands newly discovered and uninhabited muted the slaughter. Just to name two examples.

History becomes then this critical battleground. Stories that declare saints and villains, that call on God to sacralize conquest and to vilify enemies, and stories that direct our eyes away from the shards of glass beneath our feet only to affirm the inherent goodness of the country are rife with the workings of power and the comforts of fantasy.

Those who bear the brunt of it all must tell their stories, excavate the ruins, expose the lies, and call on their dead to haunt and hunt the monsters that roam the land.

Frantz Fanon wrote in his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth that “[c]olonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”

I think that insight reaches beyond the unique configuration of domination that is colonialism. It speaks not only of what happens to “the native” but to those, in this case, white folk, who end up ensnared in the jungle of their own making. So much so, as Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, that this version of history “changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be…. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

The denial of the American past speaks more about them than us – about their desperate need to be white without judgment; to cull the evidence that reveals the lie that sustains the world they so desperately want.

But we must tell our stories, especially in this 250^th year of the nation. Tell the story of our grit and resilience, of our joys and triumphs. We don’t need the White House to co-opt it or liberal sentimentality or the clutching of pearls at Trump’s racism to demonstrate your virtue and decency. We know, to reference an old gospel song, how we got over here. And we know you.

When the country celebrated its founding and told a story of freedom that denied the reality of unfreedom in its midst, we told our story. On January 1^st, we used the abolition of the slave trade to tell a different story of freedom. On July 5^th, we invoked the abolition of slavery in New York to offer our freedom dreams. On August 1^st, West Indian Emancipation Day anchored our hopes and called attention to the hypocrisy of the nation. Juneteenth celebrated our resolve and exposed the meaning of delayed freedom.

Fugitive knowledge offered us blueprints, maps, guides, recipes, tools, stories to survive and flourish here despite the madness of those who claimed the country as their own.

On May 31, 1926, in the 150^th year of the country and the year Negro History Week was created by Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, A. Philip Randolph spoke at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He framed the celebration in light of the journey of its darker souls. Chronicled the gifts of Black folk, detailed our achievements in history and education, in labor and the arts. And no matter what the crowd thought of what he said, Randolph radically interrupted the nation’s story of itself.

He told our story at the moment the nation gathered to lie about itself.

And here we are 100 years later in the 250^th year of this nation, drowning in a mass of lies and in the evils of American racism once again. The reality is what it is. Donald Trump is who he is. No matter. We will continue to tell our story, as we have always done, because we know it is a miraculous tale of the enduring power of the human spirit colored a deep shade of blue!

And therein may lie the country’s salvation.