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WHY TRUMP’S ‘ANTI-WOKE’ ATTACK ON THE SMITHSONIAN MATTERS  
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Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley
August 27, 2025
The Guardian
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_ The president’s assault on US museums, education and memory is a
critical dimension of his fascist aims _

Smithsonian Institution Building,

 

In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12
August, the Trump administration
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its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive”
or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and
“constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White
House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of
which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the
Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project.
Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly
depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that
acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights
racist voter suppression measures, among others.

The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a
broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every
day. The federal occupation of Washington DC
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free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents,
the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of
the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the
nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the
destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory
as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against
fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack
on American museums, education and memory, along with his
weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian
sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist
aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial
conditions of possibility.

Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on
the construction of a _mythic past_. The mythic past is central to
fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a
dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the
sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was
pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind
of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great
achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the
assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history
and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on
democracy.

From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of
the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group
can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed,
as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a
kind of treason.

The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on
the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The
anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that
failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of
too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those
who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as
opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the
mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact,
the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically
entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.

It is clear that the Trump administration understands this
relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational
piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it
is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an
executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and
Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban
“improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a
scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy
thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with
the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power:
Stories of Race [[link removed]] and
American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a
human invention”.

The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a
biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating
enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial
inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded
enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of
the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s
declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to
turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It
is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is
constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How
else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval
Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?

The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace
of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race
and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the
whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the
deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project.
A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by
teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies
which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The
story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America
is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial
democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this
knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the
American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for
example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s
westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and
manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and
Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its
infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.

Museums allow us to reckon with the brutality of the American legacy
as well as expose our citizens to the people, institutions and
strategies that charted a different course towards becoming a “more
perfect” union. Fascist erasures like Trump’s hide behind the
claim that truthful encounters with the past inflame and divide. This
instinct is the opposite of the truth. A functioning democracy does
not restrict perspectives to those of the dominant group, much less
make it illegal to teach alternative ones.

A people who cannot remember their past are a people who cannot resist
a fascist future. Knowing our history can give us the weapons and
wherewithal to battle Trump’s efforts to catapult us back to a time
when the majority of Americans lacked both the civic and economic
power that we have now. The fight for our museums and for our memory
is a critical xxxxxx against the unraveling of American democracy. It
is vital that we fight to protect our repositories before it’s too
late.

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_Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar
of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law
and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender
issues_

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_Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of
Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the
Past to Control the Future_

 
 

* Smithsonian
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* Trump's racism; Trump's reactionary attacks
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