Donald Trump on Thursday launched an extraordinary attack on American education at a history conference in Washington DC, downplaying America’s historic legacy of slavery and claiming children have been subjected to “decades of leftwing indoctrination”.
Speaking at what was dubbed the White House Conference on American History, the president intensified efforts to appeal to his core base of white voters with a historically revisionist speech, while blasting efforts to address systemic racism as divisive.
The president specifically attacked the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning endeavor that was published last year to cast a spotlight on the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in America.
The 1619 Project “warped” the American story, Trump said. The president said the project claimed the US was “founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom”. Trump said children should know “they are citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world”.
He also used the appearance to announce plans to establish a commission to promote patriotic education, dubbed the 1776 Commission, that would be tasked with encouraging educators to teach students “about the miracle of American history”.
Critics were swift to condemn Trump’s new “patriotic education” plan and his attacks on the 1619 Project, something he said the teaching of which was akin to “child abuse”, with journalists quickly asserting his claims as blatantly false.
Pres Trump said this of history to loud applause: “A radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. We can’t let that happen.”
Context: A movement is happening to look at America’s flaws and it’s original sins of slavery and stealing land.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) September 17, 2020
The president, who called curriculum on race “toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds”, continued his administration’s efforts to restrict the telling of American history in schools to erase a legacy of racism, genocide and imperialism. The president recently threatened to cut funding to California schools that teach the 1619 Project. Trump has already cracked down on anti-racism training sessions in federal agencies.
He also argued that America’s founding “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism and built the most fair, equal and prosperous nation in human history”. But he did not mention the 246 years of slavery in America, including the 89 years it was allowed to continue after the colonies declared independence from England. Nor did the president acknowledge the ongoing fight against racial injustice and police brutality, which has prompted months of protests this year.
Responding to the president’s remarks, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the writer behind the 1619 Project, made an observation on who isn’t included in Trump’s retelling of American history:
The White House Conference on American History has not a single Black historian on it. Strange.
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) September 17, 2020
Hannah-Jones also told the Associated Press that the first amendment to the Constitution abhors government attempts to censor speech and guarantees a free press.
“The efforts by the president of the United States to use his powers to censor a work of American journalism by dictating what schools can and cannot teach and what American children should and should not learn should be deeply alarming to all Americans who value free speech,” she said.
Meanwhile members of the Trump administration, including education secretary Betsy DeVos, remain silent on the backlash.
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