Eyes Wide Shut
Forgetting Slavery and Racism as part of America’s 250th Anniversary
Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut peered into a mysterious sexual cult of the rich and powerful that operated high above the law. (While the connection is tempting, what follows is not about the Epstein files.). The film blurred the line between dream and reality, demonstrating the cognitive condition where people willfully ignore something otherwise visible to accommodate preconceived notions or to achieve desired outcomes. That cognitive condition is not limited to individuals. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, we Americans are being encouraged, no, ordered, to remember the past with eyes wide shut.
The order comes directly from President Donald Trump, who takes outsized pleasure in flourishing his Sharpie pen at the world. As the new school year begins, one of Trump’s executive orders requires our attention.
Executive orders are nothing new. The United States Constitution, specifically Article II, Section 3, states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Called the “Take Care” clause, it establishes the president’s mandatory duty to ensure the laws passed by Congress are fully implemented. Congress writes the laws; the president (and his fifteen cabinet agencies) executes them.
While the scope of the “Take Care” clause has long been debated, the power implies some (though limited) presidential discretion. Only Congress can make laws. The president cannot refuse, suspend, or rewrite laws; the president is the executor, not the legislator. The rules and regulations that the president creates—executive orders—are only valid if authorized by the Constitution or Congress. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a highly contested executive order that he presented as a military order, and Congress later passed as the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The incidence of executive orders has changed with time. Due to his untimely death, President William Henry Harrison served just one month in the White House, which probably explains why he is the only president not to issue an executive order. None of Harrison’s eight predecessors signed more than ten such orders. The real game changer was Ulysses S. Grant, who signed 217, almost equal to the cumulative total of all seventeen presidents who preceded him. President Theodore Roosevelt blew past that record with 1,081 executive orders, only to be outdone by his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued a whopping 3,726 executive orders. The numbers have fallen since then: George W. Bush signed 291 executive orders in eight years, like Barack Obama’s 276 during his two terms. President Donald Trump, by contrast, might challenge the record, having signed 188 executive orders in the first six months of his second term.
Executive Orders have rarely been so controversial as those signed by Trump, who has crossed the line from execution of the law to legislation. On March 27, 2025, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the content of which should make you shudder. It begins:
“Over 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 truth.”
That’s quite the opening statement. Nothing gives rise to a “distorted narrative” quite like the self-professed ownership of “objective facts.” At least the president no longer espouses “alternative facts,” as was standard practice during his first term. Then again, he is now the one rewriting history; let’s call it whitewashing history, literally.
Rewriting history is what historians sometimes do, as happens with the discovery of new or improved information about the past. Consider, for example, the death of President Harrison. It was long thought he died of a severe cold caught while delivering the longest inaugural speech ever. In 2014, however, medical scientists determined that the 1840s White House water supply was downstream of public sewage, such that Harrison likely died of septic shock due to typhoid. The winter weather of 1841 was irrelevant. Thus, the history had to be rewritten.
Trump would probably call that trivial. He is after something altogether different, something he thinks is bigger, something he has labeled “revisionist.” But what is this revisionism? Who should feel threatened by it? His executive order addresses the matter in code:
“This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed… the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame… we will restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness…”
Beware of what’s lurking behind those lines of the executive order. Putting aside the one emotion that the president has steadfastly failed to demonstrate—shame—the order breathes new life into the long-standing concept of American Exceptionalism.
After traveling extensively throughout America during the early 1830s, the thirty-year-old French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, composed a two-volume masterpiece entitled Democracy in America, where he compared America to France and England. Tocqueville observed, “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no other democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one." That was the first known reference to America as “exceptional,” which became a new religion: American Exceptionalism. Ever since, we Americans have been told that our country is special, even unique, inherently superior to other nations, destined for world leadership.
America does indeed have a “legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” as Trump claimed in his executive order. But to call that legacy “unparalleled” smacks of jingoism, or the sort of extreme patriotism bordering on bellicose nationalism. To say that America’s legacy is unparalleled is also to suggest that America is good enough, that there is no room for improvement, which is ridiculous. Can you imagine Steve Jobs implying that the iPhone was “good enough”?
It’s beyond time to face the truth: America is indeed special, but American history is pockmarked by oppressive racism. Both can be true. That’s not revisionist, it is realist. Racism is a fact that no executive order can make otherwise. Since Trump has not actually read any of the historians he ham-fistedly slanders as “revisionist” (as if that were a terrible thing), he is unaware that none of those historians claims America is “irredeemably flawed.” Quite the contrary. The point they make is that this country can and should do better. Isn’t that the American way? That is the reason America is special; it is in a continual state of improvement.
Historians learn that the natural, if unfortunate, impulse for any group or organization is to marginalize, reconfigure, mock, or simply dismiss any reflection that undermines its legitimacy. Nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan highlighted what is perhaps the defining element in that legitimizing process. “Forgetting,” he suggested, “is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and that is why progress in historical research is often a threat to nationality.” Promoting ignorance of a nation’s missteps—intentionally forgetting—caps progress, just as it increases nationalism of the hostile sort.
Americans have been perpetually persuaded (by slaveholders, southern ministers, government officials, teachers and textbooks, and now Trump) to forget such things as slavery and America’s tradition of racism. Our federal and state governments currently enforce forgetting through attacks on universities, banning of books that address slavery, renaming of statues and military bases to honor Confederate soldiers, and shutting down corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. There is nothing subtle about what is happening. It is the sort of racism Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, even as he orders the rest of us to forget.
Not convinced? Just look at Trump’s instruction to the Secretary of the Interior, as stated within the March 27 executive order:
“…take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people..”
That is American exceptionalism at its most corrosive. Uncomfortable truths be damned. To make matters worse, Trump also ordered the Secretary of the Interior to:
“…take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate…”
You know what that means. It could not be clearer: bring back those Confederate statues. It is a direct order for Americans to stop talking about racism and to forget the legacy of slavery. Don’t mention Jim Crow, racially motivated lynchings, or the unlevel playing field on which Black Americans have had to compete for generations. The Smithsonian, America’s most treasured museum, should refrain from exhibiting anything that might cast America in “a negative light,” like the fact that Trump was twice impeached.
America is special in many ways, no doubt. Among our special attributes is the ability to solve problems. One persistent problem still in need of attention, however, is the long-standing racial tension that has divided us from the start. To say otherwise is to proceed with eyes wide shut.
The metastatic cancer of slavery, genocide, misogyny and related ills have always distorted our high ideals, which were always aspirational, as we were among the first nations in the world to espouse and attempt to implement democracy. But not for all. Our white male largely 'Christian' founders included slave owners. Then the greed for land and wealth led to the displacement and slaughter of our Native Peoples over almost the whole span of our history, followed by the illegal seizure of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California from Mexico (Mexicans were brown skinned mestizos--people a mix of First Peoples, African ex-slaves and Hispanics, so this was apparently okay), and let's not forget that women could not vote or inherit property until modern times. We have aspirations to do better, but many among us aren't too anxious to do that if it means giving up their privileges as white male Christians.
We are a great nation precisely because we HAVE fought against racism and ignorance throughout our history. Sometimes, it seems to win for a while, but people are fighting hard now to get back on a path to greatness, through increased electoral, economic and social equality for all. The ongoing struggle and eternal vigilance are what history needs to describe. We would not be so great if it were easy.