'Obscene': MSNBC analyst snaps back at Trump official's museum plan to whitewash history
Reacting to an appearance on Newsmax by Donald Trump’s choice to oversee the overhaul of Smithsonian Museum exhibits, programming and artwork that the administration finds objectionable, MSNBC analyst Eugene Robinson pushed back on Friday morning.
During her interview on Newsmax, Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president, attempted to explain reports that the portrayal of slavery in the nation’s museums needs to be toned down.
As she explained, “What we're doing is we just sent a letter to the Smithsonian asking for all information regarding their exhibits and their placards to try to get to the bottom of what happened and where the Smithsonian went wrong, and try to make the Smithsonian amazing and great and live up to what the president wants the Smithsonian and D.C to be.”
She then added, “It's not about whitewashing, it's all about full context so, while slavery is obviously a horrible aspect of our nation's history, you can't really talk about slavery honestly, unless you also talk about hope and progress. And I think we need to be focusing on the progress that we've made since then and we need to stop focusing so much on the lack of progress.”
That led “Morning Joe" co-host Jonathan Lemire to note, “Ignoring by whitewashing, by downplaying our history, our greatest sin as a nation, that's not that's not good for our democracy, that's not good for our health of our nation and certainly that's not the role of this museum.”
He then turned over the floor to Robinson, a former columnist at the Washington Post, who had a few things to say.
“It certainly is not to to to align the Smithsonian Museums with Donald Trump's view of history would be ahistorical and frankly, it would be obscene,” he stated.“It would be an obscenity, it would be a denial of our history,” he added. “I don't know if these people have ever been to the American History Museum, to the African American Museum, on the mall. If they do go there, they might learn something about our history. They might learn that, yeah, there was slavery for 250 years in this country in this land.”
“And then after the Civil War, which outlawed slavery in the South, there was the Reconstruction for a few years and then there was Jim Crow. There was Jim Crow discrimination and repression. There was, you can only ride in the back of the bus there was you cannot vote, which was the message to Black people in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in my youth,” he lectured.
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