In 2003, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin successfully defended a dissertation based on meticulous research across French, Spanish, and English. Kevin D. Roberts’s Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831 articulated an argument about how enslaved people resisted bondage by forming alternative social and cultural structures, contending that Black Americans “employed a variety of tools — cultural traditions, secret and overt resistance, and a distinctive ideology of politics ‘from the ground up’ — to tweak, alter, and challenge” white supremacy.
Like most dissertations, it wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking but rather an example of the methodical expansion of knowledge that is the purpose of academic research. Ultimately, Roberts landed a tenure-track job at New Mexico State University, where he taught for two years and was remembered fondly after he left. That was precisely what surprised the faculty in 2021, when Roberts was named the director of the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative think tank responsible for the bulk of the dystopian Project 2025 that is currently enacting a veritable Kulturkampf across American society. Perhaps the most cynical conclusion is that Roberts, a White researcher, studied Black history as a means to better understand and continue the oppression of Black Americans and others deemed unworthy in the eyes of the regime.
I thought about Roberts when reading the disturbing news that Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III is planning to retire as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution by end of the year, following relentless harassment from the Trump administration. Prior to his appointment to the position in 2019, Bunch had served in several different roles throughout the Smithsonian museums, including as founding director of the acclaimed National Museum of African American History and Culture. As Hyperallergic Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia and Staff Writer Anna Lee reported yesterday, “Bunch has repeatedly clashed with and stood up against the Trump administration” in its dogged pursuit of historical revisionism as a means of not just White-washing American history, but indeed in facilitating a radical cultural takeover. (They also reported that, “in an interview with the Washington Post, Bunch said Trump’s pressure did not play a role in his decision to step down.”)
Like Roberts, Bunch is a specialist in African-American history. Unlike Roberts, Bunch has used his expertise as a means of presenting to the public the most up-to-date, critically informed, and scholarly rigorous information. That Bunch resigned does nothing to diminish his admirable — even heroic — work but underscores the tremendous pressures that might have led him to this decision.
