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.
