Trump’s White Nationalist Vision for the Future of History
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. Plenty of previous politicians offered tacit sympathies for white nationalist ideas with coded terms like “states’ rights” and “law and order,” but we have to journey back over one hundred years, to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, to find an executive branch so supportive of white nationalist ideologies in the study 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. For white nationalists, 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. It was the accomplishments of America’s great white men, we are led to believe, that brought us the prosperity for which we should all be so thankful. To question them—even if they enslaved, raped, and killed for power, expansion, or wealth—would be to question America itself.
Various versions of this story exist. For decades, the most pervasive version of this mythology lived in the American South. From practically the day after the Civil War, white Southerners crafted a white nationalist morality tale—in popular culture, veterans’ organizations, and the Lost Cause ideology—of lazy Black slaves with generous white masters who in the 1860s did their best to fight off a war of “Northern Aggression” that threatened white Southern freedom. For most of the twentieth century, this story was advanced by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC—activists who dedicated much of their lives to celebrating white Confederate heritage. They published textbooks, erected monuments, and led public ceremonies honoring the legacy of the Southern white men who tried to destroy the United States.
Meanwhile, Black historians such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Hope Franklin were literally segregated from the archives, banned from studying in Southern libraries because they were Black. When Franklin went to an archive to conduct research, he recalled, “My arrival created a panic and an emergency among the administrators…. The archivist frankly informed me that I was the first Negro who had sought to use the facilities there.” Black people were not supposed to be in the archives, let alone be in charge of telling America’s history.
Since American public universities fully desegregated in the 1960s, historians of different backgrounds have thoroughly dispelled the Southern Lost Cause and other white nationalist mythologies. These historians see more nuance in Founding Fathers who called for freedom even as they enslaved humans. As Franklin explained of his groundbreaking book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, “My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.” Subsequent decades of cutting-edge research have rescued millions of nonwhite actors from the margins—Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and more—showing that they also played major roles in the formation of the United States. In other words, America wasn’t just built by white people. The struggles of millions, not only the brilliance of a select white few, are what made possible American affluence and endurance.
