[POST] The history of erasing history
The undesirables slated for disappearance under Trump 2.0
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A tale as old as time: winners write history and losers are written out of history.
From America’s New Map:
American documentarian Ken Burns notes that “race is at the core of the American story.” Until recently, that story was told in a one-sided fashion befitting a country populated overwhelmingly by Whites. America was 81 percent White in our first national census (1790) and that share crept steadily upward until peaking at 90 percent at the middle of the twentieth century.
As America began exporting its model of globalization-through-integration following World War II, the White share of its population began its slow decline to just under 60 percent. What had been a pre–World War II immigrant flow dominated by Europeans eventually morphed into one dominated by Latinos and Asians. In 2050, Whites will comprise 47 percent of our population—just over half that 1950 high point. That steep demographic journey is unprecedented among the world’s great powers. It has never been attempted—much less self-engineered.
Trump 2.0 clearly seeks to recreate that peak Whiteness by driving down immigration, pushing the undocumented to self-deport, and to — more generally — erase from public consciousness the very nature of our nation’s growing diversity.
NYT: Here are the people Trump doesn’t want to exist
The targets are clearly defined:
Women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ+ community are main targets.
Sounds harsh for an accusation, yes? But the evidence is there.
When the Trump administration encounters a group it doesn’t respect or care for, oftentimes it just deletes them — specifically, the very record of their existence.
For example, when the Defense Department was asked to cull all DEI-related content from its websites, it removed approximately 26,000 images. A list of the deleted photos was given to the Associated Press. About 19,000 of them included descriptions, and our analysis found that 4 out of 5 depicted women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities.
The point? Those people are not part of the story of American history, which is the almost exclusive purview of straight White men.
Read almost any standard history and it is full of straight White men who do everything, accomplish everything, invent everything, win everything, and build everything.
I asked Perplexity to calculate the following: What percent of America today consists of straight White adult men?
And the answer is 20%.
So, 80 percent of America presently falls outside that band.
Was it different in the past?
Taking into account that non-heterosexual males were significantly less likely to self-identify in that manner in the past, Perplexity estimates 22% for 1776 and 29% for 1950.
So, whether or not you’re looking at today or in the past, that’s a lot of Americans to erase with histories dominated by straight White adult males.
But, of course, that history isn’t evenly distributed — any more than the power structure of our country has ever been evenly distributed.
Per Perplexity, it’s safe to say that straight adult White males are strongly overrepresented in positions of power (elected office, corporate boards, senior executives, etc.), typically to the tune of 50-60% of positions held, so at least 2x-to-3x over-represented as a population share (20%).
Pulling back our lens further to look at the world and Perplexity finds the adult White straight male share to be a bit over four percent. So, yeah, when America’s power class looks abroad, it sees a very different picture and all that instinctive not-us-ism tends to make you more tribal in outlook.
So what is the political value in erasing so much of America?
Simply put, if the government does not recognize you, then certainly it can’t owe you anything relative to those Americans it does more readily recognize. They always seek a handout while we surely deserve a hand up.
Thus, the bias here typically disenfranchises the poor disproportionately.
Fastest way to make Americans look richer? Stop tallying the poor.
While the administration’s attacks have clearly been focused on non-Whites, LGBTQ+ groups, immigrants and women, others’ existence has also proven inconvenient for the Trump agenda. Take, for instance, the poor.
Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services fired the entire team that calculates government-wide poverty guidelines, which determine who is sufficiently low-income to qualify for benefits such as food stamps. Perhaps if we never define or quantify poverty, the administration seems to believe, poor people would cease to exist — and therefore would no longer be entitled to safety-net services.
The Social Security Administration similarly took down its Disability Analysis File, a long-running dataset containing historical, longitudinal and one-time data on all children and preretirement adults with disabilities. The agency also canceled multiple surveys tracking outcomes for children and adults on government income support related to their disabilities.
Out of survey, out of sight, out of mind.
Other government acknowledgments of people with different physical or mental abilities — such as long-standing federal guidance to private businesses about their obligations under the Americans With Disabilities Act — have also been deleted.
The administration’s efforts to disclaim people with disabilities has even turned international: The State Department is removing all references from its annual human rights report to people with disabilities (as well as women, indigenous communities and LGBTQ+ people).
When you parse things like this, you realize how narrowly Trump 2.0 is willing to define success, and that is a hallmark of authoritarianism — as in, the right people are winning and the wrong people are losing.
Authoritarian governments persistently rewrite history to their own ends, actively destroying contradictory evidence. It’s all about controlling public memory: George Orwell’s bit from 1984 about “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” By rewriting history, the rulers-that-be can shape perception and maintain their power.
This was very much Josef Stalin’s approach in the USSR: You were good and acceptable until you weren’t, and, as soon as you weren’t, you were disappeared (along with your family) and erased from all official history (something Orwell went to great lengths to highlight in 1984).
It turns out that Stalin didn’t need or even know that guy, then the same thing happened to that second guy, and then the third guy and pretty soon all of history was made possible by Stalin and Stalin alone.
Sound familiar? One day, So-and-So is a great guy and a perfect brother-in-arms and then the next day he’s a lunatic traitor whom I, the Great Leader, can no longer recall — Musk going the way of Trotsky.
The Nazis, of course, were masters at this sort of thing — just taking the whole “erasure” thing to its logical conclusion. But, long before the Final Solution, the regime systematically removed Jewish and other “undesirable” figures from public life, art, and history. Names, images, and contributions of Jews and other targeted groups were erased from records, books, and photographs, much like Stalin’s purges of his rivals.
And if you are disturbed by any of this, then you’re crazy — subject to Trump Derangement Syndrome — because none of this is really happening and any reports to the contrary are “fake news.”
How long can this gas-lighting of Americans continue? It can continue as long as the underlying social and political conditions allow, but Trump’s growing censorship of public discourse will really only be diminished through increased public awareness, a free press willing to fight back, and strong institutions (yay Harvard!) willing to stand up to this generalized assault on the truth.
Simply put: stand tall or be erased.
