Trump Admin Removes Language Critical Of Confederate Memorial At Arlington Cemetery [Op-Ed]

We really didn’t need any more evidence of the efforts by President Donald Trump, his administration, and the MAGA movement to miseducate America by whitewashing U.S. history while calling it an effort to fight “woke indoctrination.” 

Those of us who actually read books and know things could see clearly why Trump and his white and fragile minions are forcing African American history museums to remove exhibits related to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, having white attorneys who are not historians decide how much Black history is too much Black history, and pushing for right-wing curricula to be implemented in learning institutions across the country. 

We understood the motivation for Trump’s effort to hide the fact that President George Washington enslaved Black people. And we knew none of it had anything to do with “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” as the president’s previous executive order would have us believe. 

We knew why, under Trump, the National Park Service webpage tried to erase Harriet Tubman from the story of the Underground Railroad, which it laughably described as an example of “Black/White Cooperation” in the abolition movement. 

We knew why his administration directed NPS  to remove visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi.

Trump is racist, his administration is racist, and MAGA is racist — and they’re all deathly afraid of Black history because of the way it destroys their delusion of American exceptionalism. It’s the same reason the administration has now removed language criticizing a memorial to the Confederacy formerly located in Arlington National Cemetery.

As the Washington Post reported, in 2023, a 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and unveiled in 1914 was removed from Arlington following a decision made by Congress to rid U.S. military property of names and symbols honoring the Confederacy and its leaders — a decision Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been working hard to undo since the start of Trump’s second term. The bipartisan Naming Commission elected to remove the memorial largely over its depiction of an enslaved woman carrying an infant child of a white officer and an enslaved man following his owner to war — because only a proud white supremacist would romanticize such a thing.

A white supremacist would also be invested in removing evidence of the intentional romanticizing of slavery from a government website.

From the Post:

A Defense Department website and a marker at the memorial’s former site included contextual language describing the sculpture as portraying a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” The website also described the two Black figures as enslaved people, including an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” and it remarked on how the portrayal of the “faithful slave” helped to shape American pop culture.

Now, that language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy.

The website also formerly featured additional context about the sculpture’s symbolism, including a Latin phrase inscribed on it.

“An inscription … construes the South’s secession as a noble ‘Lost Cause,’” the website previously read. “This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13^th, 14^thand 15^thAmendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans.”

That language and other text was removed in recent weeks, according to photographs of the sign and archived versions of the webpage.

It’s not surprising, of course, that this administration would want to hide the truth about how ideological indoctrination has always worked in the U.S., despite the consistent claims made by white conservatives that critical race theory and “wokeness” are what’s plaguing the nation’s educational institutions. After all, this is the same administration that sees nothing wrong or racist about a commemorative statue depicting a “Mammy” holding a white slaver’s baby while his other slave trails behind him. In fact, Hegseth said last year that the statue would be reinstalled at Arlington, as did then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another anti-CRT crusader.

For a party that has been so desperate to convince us it’s the Democrats who were pro-slavery historically, Republicans sure do seem invested in preserving that legacy in all its glory.

Interesting, right?

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