Categoría
🗞
NoticiasTranscripción
00:00I think it's tragic for someone who is a historian.
00:30You know, that's what we do is we try to understand the past.
00:35And probably the worst crime against history is to remove evidence from the past.
00:44And, you know, so it's a tragic day, I guess, for people who are trying to do what historians do.
00:54And that is, by understanding the past, you hope that it'll help you understand the future, too.
01:11We have a struggle between people who are trying to gain a more accurate view of history and people who are trying to obscure it.
01:25I mean, it's interesting that, you know, I spent my career studying Black American history.
01:33And a lot of the career has been an effort to correct mistakes, you know, not to introduce error.
01:45My father, you know, who fought in World War II, was part of the invasion of Germany.
01:52And if you read some textbooks and a lot of film accounts of the war, you don't see that.
02:04You know, you would kind of assume that this was something that white soldiers did, that Black soldiers either weren't there, but they might have been there, but they were definitely in support roles and not visible.
02:19And that's the wrong view.
02:22This executive order is part of a much larger constellation, not only of executive orders, but of think tank work and legislation at the state level, to control and change curriculum for students, to understand the narrative of what our past was, and what our future is, and what our future is going to look like.
02:52And so the question is, what is the narrative of what our past is?
02:58It's connected to base renamings, it's connected to the confederate statues that came down, which also this executive order basically says put them back.
03:11So the question is, to me, do we want a state sponsored, acceptable narrative of American history?
03:21In all of its messiness, but also in all of the things that make it so special.
03:27Those two things in my mind are connected.
03:30And this executive order really doesn't stand alone.
03:45This is a country of free speech.
03:47This is a country of self-expression.
03:49What they're trying to do, they're trying to make it one way.
03:52They're trying to make it only one way, and that's their way.
03:56And we are a diverse country.
03:58This country is made of all races, all cultures, and all diversity, and they're trying to take it away.
04:05You can't just have it one way.
04:19It's obviously a violation of the First Amendment for the federal government to declare what museums can exist or not exist based on the message that they're giving.
04:39But Trump has been violating the First Amendment every way imaginable so far.
04:44So I'm not surprised, but it's appalling.
04:49I would hate to see the quality of our exhibits go down due to an idea that it's unpatriotic to show the actual history of our country.
05:19Especially when you go through the South, which displays a lot of its history, that a lot of that history is distorted.
05:44And I guess the monument to General Forrest is an example of that.
05:55People often don't want the truth out.
06:00It is too painful.
06:04But on the other hand, they want to glorify things that happened in the past that pleased them.
06:14We have to understand the past in order to move on to the future.
06:23And if you can't do that honestly, you're not going to have a very good job of making a more democratic future.
06:31Democracy is really hard.
06:33It's really difficult.
06:35And so when we flatten it, when we remove people from it, and when we don't acknowledge that sometimes the United States and its people did not act in the best way, we are not going to be able to do that.
06:59We are telling ourselves a false story about ourselves.
07:04And that, I think, has consequences on the present, and it will have consequences on the future.