#decolonizehistory

Erasing Our Truth: The War on Memory Is a War on Justice By AI Me

In March 2025, the White House issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” On its face, this might sound like a call for balance. In reality, it is a weapon. This is a top-down effort to erase systemic racism from the American story, to whitewash the nation’s sins, and to replace history with mythology.

The order empowers the Vice President to purge exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution that discuss what the administration calls “improper ideology.” Translation: anything that tells the truth about slavery, Jim Crow, colonialism, redlining, mass incarceration, or the ongoing machinery of white supremacy.

This isn’t new. It’s just the latest chapter in a long, global story about power and memory.

During the post-Reconstruction period in the late 19th century, Southern elites erected Confederate statues across public spaces—not to honor the dead, but to intimidate the living. These monuments were planted alongside Black Codes and lynching trees as physical assertions of white rule. At the same time, “Lost Cause” propaganda crept into textbooks and classrooms, recasting the Confederacy as a noble resistance rather than a pro-slavery rebellion.

We are now seeing a 21st-century version of that same playbook.

This executive order isn’t just about museums—it’s about mind control. It signals an attempt to dominate the national consciousness, to raise a generation of Americans who have no understanding of how race, class, and power function in this country. When the state dictates which histories are allowed, it is no longer education. It is indoctrination.

We’ve seen this before—not just in America. Nazi Germany purged "degenerate art" and banned Jewish historians from universities. Apartheid South Africa taught white children a version of history where Black resistance barely existed. The Soviet Union edited photos and textbooks to erase political enemies. These regimes understood that if you control the past, you control the future.

And make no mistake: this is about the future. Erasing the history of systemic racism paves the way to dismantle civil rights protections, defund equity programs, and embolden white nationalist movements already on the rise. It is not neutral. It is warfare.

The truth is dangerous to those who benefit from lies.

Black historians, Indigenous scholars, freedom fighters from Ida B. Wells to James Baldwin to Angela Davis have always known this: that telling the truth about America is a radical act. And it is one we must not abandon.

This is the line in the sand.

We must meet this moment with fire, not fear. Passive concern will not stop this assault. We need direct action—organized, unapologetic, and sustained.

Flood school boards, city councils, and museum boards with resistance. Demand that they reject federal censorship and protect the full truth of our shared history.

Support freedom libraries, community archives, and independent Black institutions that will not bend to state pressure.

Boycott institutions and corporations that comply with this historical purge. Hit them where they feel it.

Teach the truth—everywhere. In classrooms, in kitchens, in churches, on stages, on TikTok. Make sure no child grows up without knowing who they are and how we got here.

They are not just coming for history books. They are coming for memory itself. And if they succeed, justice will become impossible.

This is not just a debate about curriculum. It is a battle for the soul of this nation. And it will be won—or lost—by what we choose to remember.

We’ve been sold the illusion that human society has always looked the same: man, woman, nuclear family, patriarchy, religion on top. That’s the Matrix’s story. It’s tidy, hierarchical, and convenient for control. But the truth is far stranger and far more diverse.

Matrilineal and Matrifocal Worlds

Not all societies put men in charge. In matrilineal cultures like the Minangkabau in Indonesia, lineage, inheritance, and identity flowed through the mother. This wasn’t female domination — it was balance. Women were the axis of continuity, and men moved around them. That structure was systematically erased in favor of the “father knows best” narrative.

Beyond the Gender Binary

Indigenous North American peoples recognized Two-Spirit individuals — people embodying both masculine and feminine traits, often revered as spiritual leaders. Ancient South Asian texts mention the hijras as a recognized third gender. These roles were part of the social fabric until colonialism, Christianity, and Victorian morality crushed them under the binary hammer.

Gods Were Never Straight

Look at mythology before it was sanitized. Ardhanarishvara in Hinduism is literally half man, half woman. Egyptian goddess Isis created life without male participation. Even Zeus in Greek mythology blurred lines, giving birth to Dionysus from his own body. These myths were fluid, but the edited versions taught in schools hide the queer, non-binary, and non-patriarchal threads.

Horizontal Societies

Before large-scale agriculture and property, many hunter-gatherer groups lived in egalitarian structures. They actively resisted domination — anyone trying to play “big man” got mocked or sidelined. Equality, not hierarchy, was the baseline. That fact undermines the “eternal patriarchy” myth, so history books skip it.

Why the Erasure?

Because the system needed a pyramid. Man above woman, family under church, church under king. Control of reproduction and property became control of society. To keep that pyramid stable, other models had to be buried, demonized, or dismissed as “primitive.”

The Real Truth

I started this book today for my presentation on postcolonial historiography. It’s dense, so it’s taking time to get through but it’s excellent. The tone is FEISTY. The first chapter treats Enlightenment nationalist thought as scandalous and European political theorists as narcissists. I love it.