History isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to be honest. Right now, we’re watching a dangerous trend: the sanitizing of America’s past in order to sell a cleaner, prettier story. But no amount of bleach can wash the blood, scars and chains out of this country’s foundation.
The Washington Post recently reported that exhibitions and signs about slavery are being removed from multiple national parks under orders from the Trump administration. Internal emails reviewed by The New York Times reveal that the Park Service has been told to remove materials deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans.”
Translation? If it makes white America look bad, it’s got to go.
At Fort Pulaski in Georgia, officials have already pulled “The Scourged Back” photo, a famous 1863 photo of an enslaved man with horrific scars on his back. At Harpers Ferry, more than 30 signs documenting racism faced by formerly enslaved people are slated for removal. The order is being interpreted broadly — anything addressing slavery, racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, or Indigenous persecution is now fair game for erasure.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Since taking office, President Trump has consistently pushed policies and rhetoric that minimize or outright erase the experiences of marginalized communities.
From painting over a Black Lives Matter mural to temporarily scrubbing stories of Navajo Code Talkers from federal websites, his administration has treated Black and Indigenous history as disposable. Even on Juneteenth — the day that commemorates the end of slavery — Trump complained of “too many non-working holidays in America.”
Let’s call this what it is: whitewashing. Pun very much intended.
Government sites have been scrubbed of words like “injustice” and “oppression.” School libraries have purged writings by Black authors like Maya Angelou. Exhibits honoring Harriet Tubman and the Tuskegee Airmen have been sidelined. Critics say this is part of a pattern of words and actions designed to “promote a more positive view of the nation’s history,” but really it is just erasing the parts that don’t fit the fairy tale.
Pretending that slavery, racism and a campaign of mass displacement and extermination of Indigenous People didn’t shape this country won’t bring us closer to the ideals of freedom, equality and justice. In fact, it pulls us further away. The past explains the present. If you erase the scars, you erase the story — and without the story, you erase the roadmap to progress.
Simply saying things like “slavery is bad” and trying to end the conversation there seriously underplays the harm caused by an institution that forcibly uprooted millions of Africans and condemned them to lifetimes of bondage. Unless you’re siding with the slave owners, it wasn’t just “bad” — it was pure evil.
So let’s be clear. Removing evidence of slavery and Indigenous persecution doesn’t make America stronger, it makes America dishonest. History isn’t a brand campaign. And no matter how much you try to rewrite the story, those scars — like the ones etched across the back of Gordon, the enslaved man in that Civil War photo — will always remain.
Because the truth is this: America only becomes the nation it promises to be when it stops hiding from its past, and starts facing it head-on.
Lindsey Granger is a News Nation contributor and co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising.” This column is an edited transcription of her on-air commentary.
