Vox Populi:

Historian Thomas A. Foster discusses his new book Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men.

Black knowledge production, Black self-understanding, and the power of Black people to represent ourselves is under attack, which means that Black identity and Black meaning-making practices are being erased. In The Mis-Education of the Negro, published in 1933, Black historian Carter G. Woodson wrote, “The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.” Woodson is pointing to the assault on Black dignity and Black agency.

Almost 100 years since the publication of Woodson’s indispensable text, the Trump administration has attacked the reality of Black existential dread and pain experienced in this country. In short, the president is attempting to whitewash U.S. history. Just think here of the removal of the Black Lives Matter Plaza and ground mural and the removal of Black history from museums, parks, and monuments. Think specifically of Donald Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian Institution, which he charges with focusing too much on “how horrible our Country is, how bad slavery was.” In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass described the horrible beating of his Aunt Hester as the “blood stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery.” Trump would have us believe that there is something “positive” about the hell of slavery.

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