Showing posts with label Smithsonian exhibits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smithsonian exhibits. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.; The Washington Post, August 26, 2025

, The Washington Post; Is Trump right about the Smithsonian? I went to find out.

"I chose this moment to visit the museum because I wanted to see if President Donald Trump’s criticism of the Smithsonian was just his latest expression of resurgent white nationalism — or whether he had a point...

The bottom floors are devoted to, as Trump put it, “how bad Slavery was” — befitting a chapter that not only defined the Black experience in America, but also figured centrally in the Civil War and the country’s social unraveling in the 20th century. No half-intelligent or half-moral person could find anything good to say about slavery, but neither could anything about the museum’s exhibits be construed as anti-White...

I didn’t leave the museum mourning for my country. I left it, as I suspect most of the tourists around me did, stunned by the brutality of American racism but also marveling at the distance the country has traveled — even if we occasionally fall back along the way.

And this is where I fundamentally disagree with Trump and his little band of cultural revolutionaries. I, too, stand by the concept of American exceptionalism, which a lot of my Democratic friends reject as jingoistic. But the Trumpists get its meaning entirely wrong.

America is exceptional not because God wills it so, or because it has the strongest military, or because capitalism is the best economic system on Earth (although it probably is). We are exceptional because we aspire to an ideal that we know can never be met...

What Trump is doing now — trying to sanitize that story, perhaps because he is incapable of admitting fault himself — is the antithesis of what makes America exceptional. To put a happier, less discomfiting spin on the exhibits in this museum would make us more like Russia or China or North Korea, or any other country where history becomes a strongman’s self-serving fairy tale that no one outside the country believes.

We laugh at those strongmen and their mythologies. A generation from now, if I’m right about the pace of our history and the enduring strengths of our country, we’ll laugh at Trump, too."

Trump is targeting several Smithsonian artworks. Here they are.; The Washington Post, August 26, 2025

 The Washington Post; Trump is targeting several Smithsonian artworks. Here they are.


[Kip Currier: Donald Trump and his administration's efforts to remove, revise, and erase artistic and historical content are the opposite of free speech and intellectual freedom. Art should challenge us to think and feel in new ways. We as individuals are certainly free to like a piece of art, hate it, or everything in between on the spectrum of how we feel about it. But the federal (or state) government should not be controlling access to art and suppressing or falsely presenting history in a free democracy. That's what authoritarians and dictators do in non-democratic nations like Russia, China, and North Korea.

If you don't like a particular painting, book, or movie, you can simply walk away from that painting, not read that book, or not watch that movie. But it isn't your right to stop everyone from seeing art, reading books, and watching films. To paraphrase the late Robert Croneberger, Director of the venerable Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and a prolific proponent of intellectual freedom, a library isn't doing its job if it doesn't have at least one item that offends each person.

Similarly, museums, like libraries in healthy democracies, are not meant to reflect a compulsory unitary state viewpoint. We're not the Star Trek Borg Collective where everyone must think alike and individuality is verboten. The mantra of the Borg is that Resistance is Futile. Fortunately, we know that resistance is not futile: we can continue to resist efforts to sanitize art, literature, culture, and history. Exercise your right to consume what you want and disregard what you don't want. But don't tell everyone what they can and can't choose to view and read. That's undemocratic and un-American.]


[Excerpt]

"When the White House posted an article condemning a long list of Smithsonian content last week, it pointed to several specific artworks, a sampling that underlined the kind of material that could be targeted by a president who is increasingly interested in influencing what Americans see in public museums.

The list also criticized Smithsonian exhibition texts, learning materials, past performances and the institution for previously flying the intersex-inclusive Pride flag. This month, President Donald Trump said White House officials were conducting a review of the Smithsonian Institution — months after he signed an executive order seeking to root out “anti-American ideology” in the museum and research complex, an effort that experts say would amount to censorship.

The pieces are an eclectic bunch, united mainly by the Trump administration’s public criticism of them. Not all the artworks are currently on view at the museums. Taken together, they tell a story of a White House that is sensitive to imagery that appears to contradict its messaging, whether it shows a transgender woman cast as the Statue of Liberty or a boy peering over the Southern border...

Here is a look at the artworks named by the White House as evidence that Trump is “right” about the Smithsonian — and how several of the artists have responded."

Friday, August 22, 2025

We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?; The Guardian, August 22, 2025

 , The Guardian; We shouldn’t focus on ‘how bad slavery was’ says Trump. What’s next?

"The attack on museums, like the assault on education, is meant to convince us that the truth doesn’t matter, that there is no truth, that the wisest course is to blindly accept and repeat whatever lies an authoritarian government chooses to tell.

There’s some disagreement about who first said: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Some claim it was Winston Churchill, others attribute it to George Santayana. But does anyone doubt its veracity?

Perhaps the most nightmarish explanation is that our current administration actually wants us to repeat the most loathsome events of our common past – and to be assured that every act of brutality will disappear from our collective consciousness. There’s a terrifying kind of freedom in knowing that our most odious deeds will be erased from our historical memory, that what we do now will have no consequences – indeed, no reality – in the years to come.

According to the “historically accurate” museum exhibits and history books of the future, there will have been no slavery, there was no discrimination, there were no massacres of our Indigenous population. There was never a time when hard-working, law-abiding immigrant families were separated, when yet more children were stolen from their parents, when, according to the current estimate, 80,000 people – most of them entirely innocent – were imprisoned, when thousands more were kidnapped off the streets and deported from a country they had labored so hard to benefit. And none of this will be mentioned, none of this can be said or written on a wall text, lest we allow the unpatriotic ideologues to make America look bad."

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Trump, 79, Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’; The Daily Beast, August 19, 2025

 , The Daily Beast; Trump, 79, Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’

"POTUS posted a bizarre screed on Tuesday about museums in Washington, claiming the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” and is fixated on the shortcomings of yesteryear, like documenting the horrors of slavery.

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”...

The president’s complaints did not go unnoticed by lawmakers. California congresswoman and Congressional Black Caucus Whip Sydney Kamlager-Dove retweeted Trump’s message with her own, which stated: “Slavery WAS bad, Donald. It’s absurd that this even needs to be said.”

“We don’t whitewash history,” she continued, “we learn from it.” Before adding: “You keep trying to rewrite the past—@TheBlackCaucus won’t let you get away with it.""

Let’s Not Erase the History of Medical Ethics; The Hastings Center for Bioethics, August 18, 2025

Barron H. Lerner , The Hastings Center for Bioethics; Let’s Not Erase the History of Medical Ethics

"I must admit that when contributing a chapter to a new book on the history of medical ethics, I was uncomfortable with what some of my coauthors believed was the only ethical way to write history: to serve social justice. That is, history not only needed to portray past injustices to vulnerable groups but also to aim toward ameliorating the modern versions of these wrongs.  

But with the news that the Trump administration is planning to delete historical information that “disparages” Americans from National Park Service exhibits and the Smithsonian museums, I am rethinking my position. If there is one thing that characterizes good history, it is transparency. Even if one objects to the intense focus on acknowledging diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past several years, erasing what you may not agree with is not the answer. Our book, Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians, shows the virtue and importance of telling stories that conventional history has often left out.

That the book had a social justice angle was not surprising. The two coeditors, historians of medicine Courtney Thompson and Kylie Smith, as well as many of the other contributors, have for years been doing scholarship exploring the pervasiveness of racism, sexism, and ableism in the history of medicine. The Black Lives Matter movement, which accelerated after the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, led medical centers across the country to reexamine their own racist behaviors when it came to patients, research subjects, and even their own students and employees. Conversations about these and related topics energized those of us who were writing chapters.

Still, I remained uncertain that good history of medicine had to focus on these topics or, for that matter, on connecting these past abuses to similar events potentially occurring within medicine today. After all, wasn’t there a place for good history that wasn’t so overtly political—for example, telling the stories and ethical conundrums associated with famous medical figures, the discovery of specific diseases, the introduction of novel treatments, and the details of cutting-edge experiments?  

But the increasing threats by the current administration to National Park Service and Smithsonian exhibitions are causing alarms throughout the world of history. In an executive order issued in March, President Trump said he seeks to challenge “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” And in a recent letter to leaders at the Smithsonian, he stated that the institution should “celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.” To effect these changes, Trump has asked employees of the various sites to identify material they believe may be objectionable—and possibly removed or rewritten. What are some of the revisions being advocated?

One exhibit in Trump’s crosshairs, on the brutality of slavery, is housed at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. A topic within that exhibit discusses how the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act required states to return enslaved individuals who had escaped. Similarly, concerns have been raised about an exhibit at Louisiana’s Cane River Creole National Park that describes the public whipping of escaped slaves and gives the names of the enslavers who carried out the beatings. If Trump has his way, these exhibits may be removed.

Potential changes do not only apply to issues of racism. For example, officials at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina have called into question a plaque about the dangers that power plants and cars cause to plants and animals. At North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras National Seashore, an employee has raised concerns about a sign noting the danger of rising seas to wild horses.

The most worrisome thing about the potential removal of this information is its whitewashing of history. Even if one disagrees with specific claims, the best way to refute them is to provide counterarguments, not to “disappear” the contradictory statements. What’s the point of history if the parts of it that you don’t like can just be removed?

These threats to historical knowledge led me to reread many of my colleagues’ contributions to Do Less Harm. In his chapter “Centering the Margins,” historian Antoine Johnson describes much of the history of medicine as the “three D’s”: doctors, drugs, and diseases. While these topics are clearly important, focusing on them highlights the discoveries and innovations largely made by white male doctors. But who gets to say that this information is what should constitute the history of medicine? Aren’t the experiences of women and minorities, whether patients or health professionals, equally part of that history? By looking at the history of medicine through a lens of social justice, the potentially invisible stories come to light. One told by historian Ayah Nuriddin, in her chapter “Silences and Violences,” is that of National Negro Health Week, a grassroots initiative in the early 20th century that merged public health and racial justice efforts. This type of story is missing from traditional histories of medicine because, for too long, no one went looking for them.

Another largely absent topic in medical history is the treatment of psychiatric illness among Black patients. When Kylie Smith researched it, she found that psychiatrists caring for these individuals often created false dichotomies about emotional and psychological issues between Black and white patients. Such beliefs, she writes, “created and justified systems that segregated Black patients from white ones, alienated them from their families, and forced them to perform hard labor under the guise of therapy.” Perhaps this conclusion might be the sort that the Trump administration would rather not hear in its emphasis on the “grandeur of the American landscape.” But, again, excluding certain arguments from your accounts because you disagree with them prevents good history—finding facts, crafting arguments and revisiting previous scholarship—from happening.

Sometimes invisibility is right in front of our eyes. Several chapters in the book focus on museums that house medical specimens, usually “abnormal” body parts obtained decades or centuries ago for display to medical audiences as well as the general public. It took a social justice approach to history to start asking questions about these exhibits. Who were the people, so dehumanized in these displays, whose limbs and brains we now see? Is there any chance they gave consent to show their body parts? What are the ethical duties of museums that house medical specimens? Surely medical history should not only be concerned with these specimens, but also the lives of the individuals who have been partially preserved.

Finally, the most invisible group of all in medicine might be disabled people, who constitute roughly a quarter of the population. Even though such individuals are frequently under medical care, medicine has been interested in them only as examples of diseases or conditions. But who were and are these people? It is often hard to know. As historian Katrina Jirik writes in her chapter, “Disability, Archives and Museums,” “the voices of disabled people are missing from the archival record, muted, silenced by the voices of prominent actors.” Yet once you go looking for them, they are a rich part of medical history.

So, do I now think that all history must pursue social justice? I’m still not sure, but to the degree that it forces us to confront our complicated past, and to do so by finding previously unavailable information, it is a very important tool. The alternative—a sanitized version of history told with cherry-picked sources—isn’t really history at all.

Barron H. Lerner, professor of medicine and population health at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, is the author of “The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics.” He is a Hastings Center fellow. X: @barronlerner"