'Half-baked': Historian takes us inside Trump’s push to whitewash the 'ugliness of the past'

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a trilateral signing event with Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev

President Donald Trump continues to declare war on college and universities, arguing that many of them are promoting anti-Americanism. College professors, Trump says, need to be celebrating the United States instead of painting it in a negative light.

But historian, scholar and author William Sturkey, in an article published by The New Republic on August 11, argues that Trump's campaign to whitewash the darker parts of U.S. history is destructive because one must learn from the past in order to keep moving forward.

Sturkey, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, writes, "To be a historian in the time of Trump 2.0 is to teach and write history at a time when the federal government is being mobilized to promote a white nationalist version of American history…. A white nationalist vision of American history is one that centers the role of white Americans above all others and, in fact, typically treats the history of the nation and the race as one and the same."

Trump is making a concerted effort to punish the teaching of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) on college campuses. And Sturkey warns that by pushing a sanitized version of U.S. history, Trump is discouraging Americans from learning valuable lessons from the past.

"For white nationalists," Sturkey explains, "the United States is a nation created and founded by white people, and American history necessarily spurns the contributions of all other groups. The sins of slavery, segregation, and violence are excused as minor blemishes made along a path toward greatness…. The good news is that today, in spite of Trump's efforts, historians are telling more complete stories, ones that don't rely on half-baked truths, veiled hypocrisies, or a racially segregated professoriat. And the public is hungry for works that offer a more complete retelling of the American experience."

Examining the painful parts of U.S. history, the Penn scholar emphasizes, isn't anti-Americanism — it's part of a quest to keep improving the country.

"There was a time when the sight of adults screaming at school board meetings might have appeared very foreign," Sturkey writes. "Now, that's just part of America’s political culture. The incivility of the present helps us to understand the ugliness of the past…. After a brief moment when some historians began discussing the possibility of a 'Third Reconstruction,' Trump 2.0 brings the full force of the federal government against that promise, erasing Black and brown histories from public display and recentering white voices above all others so as to align with the white nationalist fairy tale that they tell themselves is America."

William Sturkey's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.