Whitewashing American history

The Trump Presidency as a project of erasure

When I teach my students about organizational culture, one of the things we talk about are artifacts: visual representations of norms and meaning. These could be art, posters, websites or office layouts. What is the organization telling you about what it is, what values it cares about? Sometimes, the answer reflects decades or even centuries of organic and incremental choices and compromises. And sometimes it reflects a stark decision to impose a certain narrative, to make certain histories, ideas or even people disappear.

Right now, the federal government is engaged in a dramatic purging of visual representations of American history and its current workforce. Some of this is a Stalinist removal of former officials. The official portraits of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are gone. An NIH mural featuring Anthony Fauci was removed.

More systematically, it is also the removal of women, persons of color, and trans people, following executive orders around DEI and gender. Here, the removals signal the end one form of representation that valued inclusiveness and a broader understanding and acknowledgment of people whose stories were not always told.

Trump is a TV guy obsessed with visuals — how many times has he described someone as “straight out of central casting”? — with a very clear vision of who is in the picture when it comes to American history.

In the Pentagon, about 26,000 images have already been flagged for removal and could lead to up to 100,000 images being cut on military websites. Videos of the World War II Tuskegee airmen were removed from the Air Force. After public pushback, the Trump administration restored the content and complained about “malicious compliance” —but how exactly are bureaucrats supposed to know which images of non-white soldiers are acceptable, and which are DEI?

Army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers had been featured in a series Medal of Honor Monday which honors Medal of Honor winners. His page was removed, however, with the new web address for the erased webpage added “DEI” to the url.

You can find Major General Rogers story archived here in the internet archive. Up until recently, his life and achievements have been celebrated. Now, he has been reclassified as DEI and disappeared.

The Medal of Honor Monday series continues to exist. Other recipients are honored. but Rogers is no longer a part of it. He still won his Medal of Honor, so why is he erased? Other Black service members are still featured. Perhaps what matters is that there is passing mention of Roger’s support for gender and race equality in a story that mostly focuses on his extraordinary military achievements.

Maybe if enough people will complain, the White House will again blame bureaucrats for “malicious compliance” and Major Rogers will return, though now without any mention of his commitment to racial and gender equality. Is that better? To keep the man in history, but remove aspects of his personality that people found worth celebrating?

Information about iconic civil rights figures have been removed. The Department of Defense was once so proud of Medgar Evers, the WWII Army veteran who became a civil rights activist until his murder by a white supremacist, that it named a Navy vessel after him. But now the page honoring the name change has been removed “in accordance with DOD instructions 5400.17” — the Pentagon digital media guide that has been updated to remove reference to DEI. A different webpage, about the ship, discusses Evers, but also indicates it has been adjusted to match the same policy.

Japanese Americans are also being erased. Because of cuts to the National Park Service, the hours of the Manzanar prison camp have been reduced. The camp was where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. At the same time, webpages that remember Japanese-American infantry units have been removed. (Archived link here).

John Inazu, a Professor of Law and Religion whose father and grandparents were detained at Manzanar wrote about what this means.

Remembering well means accounting for our past mistakes as well as our successes. That’s not always pleasant or fun, but it’s essential to understanding who we are and who we are to become. And when it comes to historical sites and museums, that means taxpayer dollars and government workers are a necessary part of our shared national commitment to speak truthfully about our past and to honor those who suffered and sacrificed so much.

Articles about Native Americans, who enroll in the military at much higher rates than other groups, have been removed. A piece about Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who was one of the group who raised the flag at Iwo Jima is gone. Axios found that at least 10 pieces about Code Talkers, whose identity was central to their ability to play a crucial role in military intelligence during World War II, have disappeared. DOD Secretary Hegseth has said “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’” But the Code Talkers are a simple and unambiguous proof otherwise. They used their tribal language to send intelligence messages in a way that allied powers could not detect. Diversity provided America with a tangible military advantage over enemies obsessed with racial purity.

Axios also found that “DEI” labels had been added to now inaccessible pages honoring Civil War nurses, prominent Black veterans and units, including the 54th Massachusetts Regiment depicted in the film "Glory" and the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. And, I shit you not, Golden Girl Bea Arthur’s page noting her record as a marine is gone.

A story about how baseball great Jackie Robinson faced discrimination in the military before he broke the color barrier in baseball has been removed.

Asked about the removal of the content, DOD spokesperson John Ullyot said “As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military.” Ah yes, the Jackie Robinson story as woke cultural Marxism. The point, again, is that race, and Robinson’s role in fighting racism, is central to his story. He is honored not just because he was a great ball player (though he was), but because of the courage he showed in facing down hate and segregation. That courage is worth celebrating.

[Update: About a month after this piece was published, the DOD restored some of the pages mentioned, such as those about Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers. Pushback works!]

A page honoring Colin Powell has been removed and relabeled as DEI. Pages discussing racial integration of the military have been cut.

A government website guide to Arlington Cemetery has removed materials to identify the graves of Hispanic or Black soldiers. Teaching guides and walking guides to Medal of Honors winners that mention Black soldiers who were initially denied the award on racial grounds were also removed. Modules on women’s history in the military are also gone.

The effect is to not just to scrub offending terms, but to also remove entire modules containing historical information. Mentions of civil rights and racial justice have been removed. Civil War historian Kevin Levin wrote:

It’s a sad day when our own military is forced to turn its back on sharing the stories of the brave men and women, who have served this country with honor.

Some of the links are still live, but only internally, and harder to find, as detailed by the Washington Post:

Among the people listed on the website’s “Women’s History” landing page are Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a leading cryptologist of the 20th century and one of the first women employed as a codebreaker for the United States; Capt. Joy Bright Hancock, who has been credited with expanding women’s opportunities in the military; and Maj. Gen. Marcelite Jordan Harris, once the highest-ranking female officer in the Air Force and the highest-ranking Black American woman in the Defense Department.

The “Hispanic American History” page lists Capt. Maria Ines Ortiz, who served in the Iraq War and was the first Army nurse killed in combat since the Vietnam War; Humbert Roque Versace, a Vietnam prisoner of war who received the first Medal of Honor for actions performed in Southeast Asia while in captivity; and the Borinqueneers, members of the U.S. Army’s 65th Infantry Regiment who fought in the Korean War.

At the same time Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is overseeing the purging of some military figures, he is bringing some back to prominence. Military bases named after Confederate Generals, like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, now have their names returned after their removal. There is a law against doing so, but Hegseth is bypassing the law by finding obscure serviceman who just happen to share the name of the confederate generals, and claiming he is renaming the bases after them. No-one believes this of course, least of all Hegseth.

Men who betrayed their own country to fight for the most despicable cause are honored again, while those who would not have been viewed as full citizens by those same Generals are erased from military history.

The removals of images mirror the removal of people, of course. In the military, the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, C.Q. Brown, and the first woman to lead the Navy, Lisa Franchetti, were removed without explanation. Now, with Franchetti gone, there is not a single female four-star general in the armed forces. Brown was replaced by a retired three star general with significantly less qualifications. Trans members of the military are likewise being removed, and intelligence officers have already been fired.

I don’t want to downplay the importance of the removal of those people, but do think understanding how organizations normalize assumptions about who belongs, whose membership is to be celebrated, and who is to be removed matters. Trump is creating a visual backdrop to his project of erasure. I spoke with Victor Ray, a sociologist who has written about how beliefs about race and belonging become embedded into organizational practices, creating “racialized organizations.” He said:

scrubbing pictures of women and people of color from government building is an attempt to reinstate the white male as a kind of default universal subject. The idea here is that with their attacks on “DEI“ (which are really attacks on Civil Right era protections) is that any person of color in public life must have gotten there through special programs while white men have gotten there through merit. Of course, if you look at the Trump administration, the opposite is true, with profoundly unqualified people like Hegseth only able to reach their status through the special treatment American society gives to mediocre white men.

NASA has removed “women in leadership” and “indigenous people” from its website. It also removed a website profile of Rose Ferreria, a student intern who became a full time employee. Ferreria is an immigrant who survived cancer and homelessness before becoming a student at Arizona State University. It is a savvy bit of marketing by NASA to broaden the pool of potential applicants: women of color playing a leading role in NASA is the stuff of movies (Hidden Figures) and TV shows (For All Mankind) precisely because it challenges us to rethink what the agency is. While in hospital Ferreria posted about the removal of the page telling her story. After adverse publicity, NASA restored the page. Then it fired her.

This extends not just to websites, but also to government offices. Charlies Ornstein of ProPublica shared a thread of the removal of images of inclusiveness.

Museums that feature representations honoring women, persons of color or LGBTQ government employees have also seen those items removed. An exhibit about trans service members was removed from the Army Women’s Museum. The National Cryptologic Museum covered offending images—but reversed course after public pushback.

It is not limited to images of diversity. The word “diversity” itself, and “fairness” are too dangerous to survive, painted over to avoid offending the new administration. (“Leadership”, “compassion” and “integrity” are also no longer welcome at the FBI).

To be clear, there remain stories and images about the people and topics I describe in some government websites. With enough public pushback some of the pages have even been restored. The erasure is not total. Instead, the point is what and who is subject to this erasure.

The rush to comply with government orders creates clumsiness and inconsistency. It is hard to see the connection between DEI and the Holocaust, 9/11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention, but articles on these topics have also been removed.

In some cases, gay people or women are being removed. In other spaces, they are maintained, but trans people are removed. Sometimes, the clumsiness is comical, or nonsensical. A Pentagon list of flagged images identified mentions of the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb. Because, gay. At the same time, a National Park website removed the representation of trans people’s role at the Stonewall uprising, praising it instead as a key moment for the “LGB” community. Here, gay is ok. But trans is out. LGB. The government redefines a movement in a way that is unrecognizable to those in it.

The representation of women or LGBTQ people or Hispanics or Asian Americans or Black people mattered because their stories had historically not been featured. Erasing them is not a return to some bygone era of color-blind merit, but of blindness to the contribution of anyone who did not fit Trump’s whitewashed vision of America.

The Trump presidency is, as much as anything, a project of purging and erasing large parts of America, of people, ideas, capacities, and knowledge. Trump has also pledged to remove the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is an independent federal agency that supports libraries, archives and museums in America.

A presidential campaign built on the Big Lie, and incorporating lots of little lies, is intolerant of images, voices or evidence at odds with its worldview. It has only one vision of America in mind, much of it fanciful, and so it will erase anyone not part of that narrative.

Related in Can We Still Govern?