Erasure, Historical Cleansing, and the Disappeared
Image by Susan Wilkinson.
Jonathan E.: Misplaced some data?
Computer Center Archivist: “The whole of the 13th century. Misplaced the computers, several conventional computers. We can’t find them. We’re always moving things around, getting organized, my assistants and I. This – this is Zero’s fault – Zero, he’s the world’s file cabinet; pity, poor old 13th century.
In the original 1975 film Rollerball, the misplacement of history was a mistake, the “disappearing” of the 13th century an act of curatorial incompetence, not political calculation.
The Trump administration’s erasures are a deliberate whitewash of inconvenient American historical truths to create its vision of a white male cistopia. Currently, these erasures from federal websites include but are not limited to:
・William Harvey Carney, a former enslaved person who joined the Union Army during the Civil War and protected the American flag, became the first African American awarded the Medal of Honor
・the roughly1,000 Tuskegee Airmen who flew 1,578 combat missions and 15,533
sorties over Italy and Germany during the Second World War
・the 400-500 Native American code talkers whose codes, based on their Indigenous languages, were never broken by the enemy during WWII
・Ira Hayes, a Native American, one of six Americans who raised the American flag at
Iwo Jima
・the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed primarily of second-generation Japanese Americans, the most decorated unit in American military history
・Jackie Robinson, who, during his stint in the Army was ordered to sit in the back of
an Army bus and was threatened with a court-martial when he refused
・civil rights activist and Army veteran Medgar Evers, recipient of the Good Conduct Medal, European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal
・information on black[1] and female soldiers interred at Arlington National Cemetery
The list of disappeared grows daily. So far, the only WASPs deleted have been the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. Nor are these erasures restricted to race. Trans people, including Marsha P. Johnson and other transgender activists of color, have been erased from the Stonewall National Monument website; the National Park Service website has removed the TQ+ from LGBTQ+, diminishing what the site disingenuously celebrates as a “milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights” of sexual minorities by 3/5th. Dredd Scott, a member of another once fractionalized community whose rights were not recognized, must be spinning in his grave.
Instead of celebrating diversity, the Pentagon’s new policy is to scrub it from its websites – even an eponymously “gay” bomber. If this facepalm-inducing lunacy seems absurd to you, brace yourself. It’s not hard to imagine a future where even the iconic Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is scrubbed from Air Force websites or “low-IQ” black stealth fighters, are replaced with white ones. After all, wasn’t it an incompetent Blackhawk helicopter that collided with an airliner over Washington, D.C.? Can you really put such idiocy past an administration that expects the public to believe that Trump was actually referring to the original 1798 Alien Enemies Act when he denied signing the executive order he issued to justify the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador?
This is what happens when your country is just not that into you – and, frankly, never has been. I suppose one could take some comfort in the fact that in the wake of public outrage, the Pentagon restored these expurgated items, claiming the deletions were not deliberate but simply a “mistake,” the work of errant algorithms. In the nuclear age, however, “oops,” “my bad” excuses cannot be tolerated; sometimes there are no second chances and the genie cannot be returned to the lamp (though one imagines in the age of MAGA-DOGE that if the genie were black, as Will Smith was in Aladdin and Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing, not only would the redcaps and Elonites desperately shove him back into the lamp but launch it at the sun on one of Musk’s “Starships,” provided it survives take-off). But this begs the question: why was the information targeted for deletion in the first place, and why did the DOD decide to comply?
Embarrassed by the public backlash, DOD officials quickly restored the links, but the damage had already been done. Even if these denials were plausible, even if the AI algorithm proved to be as stupid and racist as its users, someone in the chain of command still had to approve it, suggesting that rather than opposing the new policy, they sought an expedient means of implementing it. This should give pause to those who believe that anyone in today’s Pentagon has the spine to disobey an illegal order, particularly one issued by its commander-in-chief, the prospect of resistance made even more remote by Trump’s purge of judge advocate general (JAG) officers whose job is to ensure that commanders follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s white Christian nationalist DUI-hire Secretary of Defense, justified the JAG removals claiming had they remained they would have been “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Could it not be any clearer?
Hegseth has made it his mission to demonize D.E.I. policies:
I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength. I think our strength is our unity, our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race, in this department we will treat everyone equally. We will treat everyone with fairness. We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. That’s how it has been. That’s how it will be.
In other words, they will treat everyone as white until proven otherwise, white being America’s default mode, the unquestioned qualification for the recognition of history, personhood, and national worth.
Despite his self-avowed quest for national unity, Hegseth is complicit in policies that polarize the nation and target people of color, women, and trans people precisely because they are the “wrong” race and gender. White cistory is the only history and, thus, indelible. As far as respect goes, he has shown how much he respects women by disparaging their military service, writing in his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, “Women cannot physically meet the same standards as men… Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” Even if we accept this simplistic binary (one the President has made official by executive fiat), in which only men keep us free, where are the “Dads” who take risks to stand on principles this nation has struggled to realize rather than cave to the dictates of a whiny, incoherent man-child? Not, it appears, in the nation’s daddified, “positive masculinity”-infused armed forces. A few good men? Find them!
As for Hegseth’s view of blacks in the military, as Mike Prysner has recently written in CounterPunch, he has issued orders banning Black History Month activities and black student groups from military academies, fired former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown, and restoring the names of confederate traitors to Army bases.
However, the disappearing of black history is not confined to the military; it extends to America’s favorite pastime – baseball not racism – as well, with the MLB (that’s Major League Baseball, not Men Lacking Backbone, although it’s pretty much the same thing) announcing it will obey Trump’s orders and remove “diversity” from its Careers homepage. Meanwhile, a bevy of companies, as diverse, excluding their collective corporate whiteness, as the diversity they anxiously disavow – Victoria’s Secret, Warner Brothers, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, PBS, Google, Amazon, Amtrak, and the Smithsonian, [2] to name only a few – scramble to kill or “rebrand” their D.E.I. programs. In our colorblind-by-decree republic, how truly white of them.
But we also know the real concern of this “need to clean house,” as Hegseth has put it, is the fragility of the white male ego. “Turns out,” he writes, “all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids — white kids — feel like they’re not wanted.” As if all this historical cleansing will make kids of color and their transgender sisters and brothers feel right at home. Their fragility in a society that refuses to recognize their achievements let alone their humanity doesn’t matter and, ill-fated correctives aside, never did, which is why we are where we are.
Hegseth’s use of the phrase “to clean house” is revealing. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined “dirt” as “matter out of place.” In the minds of Trumpists, blacks, immigrants of color, women, and trans people are dirt that must be swept away to return America to its original pristine heteronormative whiteness. Make America Clean Again.
Hegseth, like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who inadvertently spoke truth to corruption when she declared with characteristically smug Karenicity that the Trump administration is “fighting law and order,” has also let slip the truth:
I don’t have to tell you all that we live in very dangerous times in a world with ascendant powers who, if they had their way, would love to be on the rise and reject the forces and capabilities and beliefs of the West. America is at the forefront of that.
Ironically, under Hegseth and Trump, America stands at the forefront of rejecting the capabilities and beliefs of the west, though, sadly, this is not the first and only time. The point is made clear in a meme sent to me by a friend that shows the knowing, war-painted face of a Native American man above the caption: “THIS IS WHY YOU LEARN HISTORY. SO YOU’RE NOT SURPRISED WHEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BREAKS PROMISES.” Assuming, of course, that this history will be taught.
As I wrote in CounterPunch in 2021, ”Until Americans realize that the contributions black and other people of color have made to America are inextricable from the nation’s history, they will continue to live in a comforting state of denial that erases anything that does not square with the fraudulent, monochromatic mythology white America manufactures to celebrate itself.
Myth, not history and memory, is the main concern of Elon Musk, who recently stated in an interview with FOX News’ Sean Hannity:
I thought the left, you know, Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring. And yet they’re burning down cars. They’re firebombing dealerships. They’re firing bullets into dealerships. They’re just smashing up Teslas. Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything awful. Uh, I’ve never done anything awful. I’ve always done productive things. So, uh, I think we just have, uh, a deranged … there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on here, ’cause this doesn’t make any sense.
Following the attacks on Telsa dealerships, another FOX News host, Harris Faulkner, hypothetically wondered if the protestors who vandalize Teslas would receive the death penalty if their owners “leave their children and pets in [their] cars” (itself a crime in several states). Apparently, Harris is unaware of the 232 confirmed cases of self-immolating Teslas (83 of which resulted in fatalities) and the non-hypothetical 674 deaths caused by Teslas. So if we’re going to dish out death penalties, shouldn’t Musk walk the green mile, too?
But Musk’s body count is not limited to those produced by his vehicular experiments. Somehow, he and his cheerleaders fail to acknowledge that his evisceration of USAID and his defunding of cancer research will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. A Boston University study estimates that internationally over 10,000 people have died of tuberculosis and tens of thousands more will contract the disease and die because of cuts to USAID’s tuberculosis prevention and response program. Similarly, it estimates that domestically over 28,000 will die because of cuts to Medicaid. Faulkner, however, is not recommending the death penalty for the perpetrators of these murders.
Despite these facts, Musk contends that Republicans are the “real” party of empathy and caring that have “never done anything awful.” Musk himself has never, ever done anything awful. He has simply been prone to misinterpretation and “awkward,” “autistic” “accidents”: A Nazi salute here, an endorsement of a far-right nationalist German political party there, a post that describes “as actual truth” an antisemitic statement proclaiming, Jews “as pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
According to Musk’s father, growing up in apartheid South Africa, young Elon befriended “his black servants.” Today, he befriends twenty-five-year-old Marko Elez, the reinstated DOGE employee who bragged that he, Elez, “was racist before it was cool,” opined that he “would not mind if Gaza and Israel were wiped off the face of the earth,” and advocated the “normalization of Indian hate.” This last statement is apparently endorsed by Vice President JD Vance, who doesn’t think stupid posts “should ruin a kid’s [Elez was 24 at the time] life,” a rubric that Vance also appears to apply to the 78-year-old man-child he serves when he isn’t allegedly boffing ottomans or awkwardly telling audiences that Usha, his Indian-American wife, “has to smile, laugh, and celebrate … anything I say, no matter how crazy.”
No, Musk has never done anything awful, although, the victims of DOGE’s fraudulent “cost cutting” would likely disagree. If they could speak, the 1,5000 animals killed in his Neuralink experiments would probably beg to differ. As would the 6,000 black Tesla workers who filed a class action lawsuit against the company charging racism. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has sued Tesla for racial harassment and retaliation.
This is the same EEOC whose two Democratic members Trump fired, an act that has left it without a quorum since federal law requires no more than three individuals from the same political party to serve on the five-member commission.” Today, it has only two members, Trump-designated Acting Chair Andrea Lucas and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, a Biden appointee. Under Trump and Musk, the EEOC, a nominally “independent” federal agency, now toting the MAGA line, warns that D.E.I. policies may be illegal.
There was a time when diversity was not anathema in America. Thirty-seven years ago, Mobil Oil took out a newspaper ad celebrating American diversity in response to racist statements uttered in 1986 by Yasuhiro Nakasone, then Japan’s nationalistic prime minister, that blamed blacks, Mexicans, and Hispanics for lowering America’s intelligence levels and in 1988 by Finance Minister Michio Watanabe, who suggested that black financial responsibility was a cause of America’s economic decline. The ad, proclaiming, “Our diversity is a strength: Let’s value it,” showed a round wooden puzzle with some pieces removed. “The American workforce,” it began, “is rapidly changing. Women, minorities, and immigrants now account for about 90 percent of the growth in the labor force. By the year 2000, they’ll represent about 60% of all the country’s workers.” It concludes, “Diversity makes good social sense. It makes good business sense. It makes America better.”
Three and a half decades later, corporate America seems less sure, more spineless. Today, as Trump, Musk, and DOGE dismantle D.E.I. policies, corporate America sits on its hands, thinking of ways to “rebrand” to the nomenclature to get around the algorithm that triggers website disappearances. Instead of standing up to the bullies, universities like Columbia collapse like dominoes, fearing the loss of federal grants. Mainstream broadcasters capitulate for fear of being sued, shifting around or outright firing black and minority anchors in the hope that their move to the right-adjacent “center” will increase their ratings and hat it will mollify the redcaps.
Where are the corporate ads against Trump’s anti-D.E.I. purge? Apparently, corporate America will call out racist foreign politicians but not domestic ones, particularly those who, when they aren’t out efficiently wasting taxpayer dollars cheating on the golf course, occupy the Oval Office. Tellingly, companies once embraced D.E.I. because they thought it was good for business (and, in fact, it was and is) – not because it was the right thing to do to solve America’s intransigent social and economic inequality. Now they abandon it to retain government largesse. Rather than follow any moral compass, they follow the money. Well, that’s capitalism for you. Or is that against you?
Viewing the Mobil Oil ad at the time, I wondered whether the puzzle was coming together or falling apart.
Now, three decades later, I know.
Notes
[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.
[2] This is not the first time the Smithsonian has engaged in historical cleansing. In 1994, in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, a planned exhibition of the Enola Gay, one of two B-29 bombers that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, its National Air and Space Museum underwent its own historical cleansing. The Smithsonian removed discussions about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to protests from veteran groups and conservative members of Congress who claimed the exhibition portrayed Japanese as victims and brought the war to a quick end. In 2003, historians protested again when a newly planned exhibit featuring the bomber failed to address the controversy surrounding the bombings and their devastating consequences. Today, the National Air and Space Museum website provides information on the bomber that, while briefly acknowledging previous protests and debates about past exhibits, primarily focuses on the technical aspects of the aircraft and does not delve into the details of the bombings and their human toll. These events took place, however, before the bomber was “outed.”
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