No landmark, historic reference to slavery — not even the image of the formerly enslaved Gordon (also known as “Whipped Peter”) whose scarred back has been symbolic of the mistreatment Black Americans endured during the many years of bondage — is safe from Trump’s whitewashing or erasure.
In accordance with the Trump administration, National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting Trump’s directive to “apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of indigenous people.”
He can demand the removal of information about slavery at many national parks, describing them as “corrosive ideology,” but Gordon’s scars, not even the photos of him, cannot vanish once you have seen them.
This is just the latest iteration of Trump’s aim to make America in his own image. It is his own deranged interpretation of the nation’s history through his myopic view.
Professor Jonathan Zimmerman of the University of Pennsylvania has posited that the action “represents an enormous increase in federal power and control over the thing we learn, [and] brought to you by a team that says education should be state and local,” he told the Washington Post.
I support Zimmerman’s position, and all should second it.
Left to Trump’s devices, the great interpretations of slavery by W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Eric Foner, et al., should be thrown in the dustbin and never referred to. Such dismissals rob us of the best understanding of this dark moment in America’s history — an imperfection less to be ashamed of than to be thoroughly and truthfully examined.
Hiding Gordon’s scars, rewriting the books and removing the testaments to the crimes will not heal the nation of its sins, felonies and misdemeanors. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, the nation’s racial history, including the Civil War, is “a process of working towards these ideals rather than a rejection of them.”
Trump’s lies and falsifications, his determination to make us accept his erroneous coding of the American past, are harmful and move us even further from the acceptance that Dr. King suggested.
If anything could be erased and never occurred, it would be the scarification on Gordon’s back, but it is indelibly there. We must all look at it and face our ugly past with the resolve not to repeat it but to transcend it.
Herb Boyd is an author and columnist for the New York Amsterdam News.