On March 27th, 2025 the executive order for “Restoring the Truth and Sanity to American History” was signed. At first, I thought to post the text of the order in its entirety to let it speak for itself, but truthfully I don’t want to give it a platform, no matter how small and insignificant this one is. I encourage you to go and read it for yourself rather than take my word, or anyone else’s word, as the framework for what you believe. All I can offer are my thoughts which are filtered through the biases of my world view and upbringing, as are everyone’s.
This executive order reads as if written by someone who is personally offended that the truth of history shows that White males weren’t always the benevolent and righteous actors they want to think they were. They specifically call out two exhibits that discuss racial oppression and one that celebrates trans athletes. It reads as though the writer believes that those exhibits are direct personal attacks rather than the illustration of a perspective on history.
This idea that only one picture of history has space to exist is dangerous and disgusting. It is an attempt to deny the existence of other perspectives. Just because someone’s experience shows white males in a negative light does not mean it is invalid. Celebrating black history, or telling the truth of black history in America is in no way, shape, or form a bad thing.
I cannot overstate how repugnant and hateful it is to couch this history as insane lies. And from the Office of the President of the United States? This is just a green light for racists around the country to feel emboldened.
The United States is, and always has been, a work in progress. Part of what makes this country so great is the admission that we have gotten things wrong along the way, but we still endeavor to fix them. As a nation we strive to further broaden the definitions of freedom and liberty that the country was founded upon because we recognize that the men who originally framed it were imperfect. The constitution is framed as a living document for the express purpose of being able to change to meet the needs of an evolving society. Enacting change in an effort to further expand equality to all people is exactly what it means to be American.
History is not meant to make you comfortable and secure. It is there to serve as a record of what decisions led to what outcomes. This information should then be used to make course corrections or improvements to further an equality before the law for all people.
The reaction to history that makes us uncomfortable is not to try and erase it or eliminate those voices from society. The reaction is to understand why it makes us uncomfortable, what that says about us, and then enact change to better align with who we are as a person. Simply refusing to believe something, or claiming it’s revisionist because it hurts your feelings is as dangerous as it is unintelligent. If Black voices speaking about racism makes you uncomfortable you should be asking why that is the case.
No human is without mistakes. Many of the beliefs that would make us shy away from the truth of our nation were ingrained in us before we were capable of understanding ourselves. We have the freedom to choose to be better. To choose to deconstruct our biases. To choose to embrace the most American ideal of them all.
In the last few years we have seen a resurgence of the mantra “States’ Rights” or “States are entitled to rule themselves and the Federal Government should stay out of it” from the GOP. Specifically, they have used this argument to justify overturning Roe v. Wade and to dismantle the Department of Education. On its surface, especially if we want to take an extremely fundamentalist reading of the Constitution that the 10th amendment unequivocally reserves the right for States to govern themselves in all things not enumerated to the federal government, or denied to the States, by the Constitution, this is not an unfounded position to take. This would include things like education and medical procedures.
The problem is that the argument of “States’ Rights” has never been about anything other than the States ability to discriminate. It has always been a clarion call for white, male supremacy.
In 1824 Andrew Jackson lost the presidential election to John Quincy Adams in a contested election that was decided in a contingent election by the House of Representatives in 1825. As no candidate had won an electing majority of the electoral college votes the House decided the election as is laid out in the US Constitution. Adams went on to name Henry Clay, another candidate, as Secretary of State in what Jackson supporters began to call the “Corrupt Bargain”. They alleged that Clay had “sold his support” to Adams in exchange for the position and this deal defeated Jackson in the house even though he had garnered the most popular votes and a larger share of the electoral votes during the general election in 1824.
Southern slave owners latched onto the narrative of the “Corrupt Bargain” and began to characterize the Federal Government as a distant, out of touch body that was trying to push their ideals onto them with no regard for their “culture” or needs. They said that States’ Rights mattered more than anything else in this nation. They threw their support behind the populist candidate Andrew Jackson and elected him in 1828 to the Presidency. This began the movement in the South proclaiming that the states, and the states alone, should determine what was and wasn’t legal in their states, specifically slavery. They were still extremely upset at the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that ended the proliferation of slavery in new states admitted to the Union. With the way the Framers had laid out representation in Congress, Southern democrat slave owners quickly saw that this would end their ability to influence domestic policy as they would lose their thin majority in the legislative bodies as more non-slave states were admitted. Thus began the campaign that States, and States alone, had the ability to determine their governance. They desperately needed to maintain their States’ Right to slavery in order to preserve their power over their hierarchical society.
The irony here is that Andrew Jackson sparked the Nullification Crisis over tariffs when he authorized the use of the military to enforce federal law in South Carolina.
In 1857, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, which is regarded as the worst ruling in the Court’s history. For now at least. With this ruling they codified that the US Constitution did not extend citizenship to Black Americans and that Congress had no authority to legislate against Slavery. This only emboldened the Southern slave owners to continue their rhetoric of the sanctity of States’ Rights and set the table for the secession crisis that led to the Civil War. It’s worth noting that Chief Justice Taney, who handed down the decision, was from a wealthy slave owning family in Maryland. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Andrew Jackson.
If you have never read the Court opinions from this case, and you’re a sicko for American history, I highly encourage that you do. It is incredibly racist and filled with tenuous logic to connect the decision that Dred Scott couldn’t be a citizen because he was the property of a white man to the argument that Congress couldn’t legislate slavery because it impeded on property rights which are determined by the States themselves. Taney used this judgment to overturn the Missouri compromise of 1820, which was not relevant to the case they were hearing. Instead using his decision that another human was property to leap to striking down a ruling that impeded wealthy slave owners like himself and his family. He unilaterally galvanized States’ Rights to discriminate and enslave other humans.
To be explicitly clear, the Civil War was about secession. And secession was about slavery. Any other reason offered is a lie. A product of Southern propaganda after the war during Reconstruction.
This is relevant today, some 200 years later, because “States’ Rights” is still about wealthy white men being able to discriminate against marginalized people. As it always has been.
The Dobbs decision, which effectively overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that federally protected the right to abortion, was ostensibly made to return the power to the States to make that decision for themselves. On its face, this isn’t a terrible decision if we take a fundamental position on the enumeration of rights. However, many States took this opportunity to completely deny reproductive rights, with some taking notes from laws codified in the 1850’s. There should be no surprise that there is a geographical overlap of this modern denial of rights and a history of slavery. The guise of “States’ Rights” was once again used by white men in power to deny the rights of who they view as second class citizens.
In March of 2025, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order directing the shut down of the Department of Education. Again we see the championing of “States’ Rights” being used to justify this decision. To be fair, federal oversight of public education is not enumerated in the Constitution and thus we can take a fundamentalist argument for this being the correct decision. However, this decision does not exist in a vacuum where it can be isolated in such a way. In context, this decision comes as the last major domino of years of GOP efforts to undermine public education and drive students towards private schools. Specifically wealthy, and predominantly white, students. This is not to say that the DoE is without fault, or that they do a great and glorious job at providing for our nation’s students. Their most important function is providing oversight and regulating States to provide access to education for disabled and marginalized students, something private schools have no mandate to do unless they receive federal funding. By removing the DoE, they are removing this funding, and thus removing the obligation of Private schools to provide access to education for anyone who doesn’t fit their preferred image. Once again, the argument of “States’ Rights” is being used to discriminate against demographics that are not wealthy or white.
“States’ Rights” is, and always has been, about the rights of wealthy white men to deny the rights of people they see as beneath them. It is a constitutional smoke screen to disguise hierarchical institutions that benefit only a select few. A select few that know if the most American tenet of “all men are created equal” were to actually rule the land they would lose their protected access to power and wealth derived from the labor of the average American.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
The opening lines to the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence define what it means to be an American. That all of us are created equal and are entitled to rights that are protected by the Government that operates at the consent of us, The People. It was written by an enslaver, Thomas Jefferson.
This is the American Paradox. Our freedom and liberty comes, and has always come, at the expense of others. Namely Black and Brown Americans and Women. The travesty of modern America is that many still cling to the ideal of White Male Supremacy, as though including others in equality before the law is somehow encroaching upon individual freedom and liberty.
It is undeniable that at the time of writing “all men are created equal” only meant White, Male, and owning property to the founders. This was consistent with the prevailing worldview where everyone else was considered a second class citizen, if considered a person at all.
What we see in today’s political climate is an effort to return to this worldview. The GOP has convinced a large portion of working class Americans that things like DEI initiatives, women’s rights, and rights of marginalized people are a direct attack on their freedom and liberty. This fear is then used to stoke those voters to vote directly against their own personal interests. Nothing about the current economic realities or outlooks benefit these average Americans. In fact, they are doing incredible harm to their ability to live a financially secure life.
The GOP conned them into voting for white supremacy disguised as “safeguarding their liberty”. And for the hateful racists who voted for and cheered on hoping for a return to antebellum era hierarchical stratification, they are not the white, male, property owning group the GOP is trying to enrich. Trump and Co. are using their racist ideals to leave them behind with the same groups of people they think they are better than. To be nothing more than a disposable labor resource with which to enrich themselves.
To be blunt, the retention of the idea that freedom and liberty is dependent on the marginalization of “the other” should be seen as unequivocally un-American.
This Nation has demonstrated a great capacity for societal change. We ended slavery in the face of being told it would mean the end of the American Experiment. We created a social safety net in the wake of the depression caused by the unregulated rich. We said that all couples, straight or gay, had the right to marry. This is just to name a few, and each time there were loud voices screaming that the change would mean the end of America as we knew it. But that was the fucking point. America as we knew it no longer served the realities of our society, so change was needed. Just like in the 1760’s when the founders realized that the colonies as they knew it needed to change in order to fit their burgeoning society. Enacting change, radical change, to serve the needs of its people is what it means to be American.
We are duly obligated as a nation to recognize this American Paradox of inequality masquerading as freedom and to enact “radical” change to bring it in line with a modern worldview. Just as our founders did.
If the Constitution is a living document, able to be amended and changed in order to serve the needs of a changing society, then so too should the Declaration be. Though it may not have been originally written as inclusive of all humans, in today’s day and age the only morally correct interpretation, that is in the interest of every American, is every single person in this nation is created equally and afforded the same rights. The tenets of what it meant to be American were written in line with what the current worldview at the time meant. It only serves as logical that as the world view changes, that definition changes with it. Therefore, clinging to white supremacy is un-American. I will die on this hill.
The People. Of, By, and For 