Non-White, Non-Heterosexual American History Under Erasure
By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
On Sunday night, CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Maryland Governor Wes Moore—the nation’s only Black governor—for a nationally televised town hall and asked him a question that, by now, most thinking Americans have already answered for themselves: Do you consider President Trump a racist?
Moore’s response was precise. He did not say the word. He did not need to. “I think that’s a question for President Trump,” Moore said. “I can tell you I know how his actions hit Black folks, and how they hit people of color.” Then he added the line that carries the weight of this entire essay: “I think his actions probably give the answer before he even has a chance to answer it himself.” [1]
The context for that exchange matters. Ten days earlier, on February 5, 2026—during Black History Month—President Trump’s official Truth Social account posted a video depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. The video ran just over a minute, ostensibly about debunked 2020 election fraud claims. At the very end, the Obamas’ faces appeared superimposed on cartoon apes as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background. The imagery invoked one of the oldest, most dehumanizing racist tropes in American history—one used by slave traders and segregationists for centuries to deny Black humanity. [2]
The White House initially defended the post. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “an internet meme” and told reporters: “Please stop the fake outrage.” Twelve hours later, the video was deleted. A “White House staffer” was blamed. Trump refused to apologize. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said aboard Air Force One. Republican Senator Tim Scott—the only Black Republican in the Senate—wrote: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” [3]
Governor Moore chose to let the record speak. And that is exactly what I intend to do here. Not because I lack the conviction to state my own position—I will get to that—but because the evidence is so overwhelming, so structurally clear, that the conclusion practically announces itself. What follows is a documented account of what this administration has done to the historical record of every American community that is not white and heterosexual. Every claim is sourced. Every source is linked. Read it. Decide for yourself. And then ask yourself what kind of country erases the truth about its own people while spending ten million dollars to restore a monument to the Confederacy.
The Executive Framework
On March 27, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order directed the removal of what it called “divisive, race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, the National Zoo, and the National Park Service. It prohibited the Smithsonian from hosting or funding exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The order directed Vice President JD Vance, in his capacity on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to oversee the elimination of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from all Smithsonian properties. [4]
The Interior Department subsequently issued Secretary’s Order 3431, implementing the executive order across the National Park Service. The Department of Defense separately ordered a department-wide “digital content refresh” to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion material from all platforms. [5]
These are the legal instruments. Everything that follows flows from them. But the question no one in the White House wants to answer is this: shared by whom? And at whose expense? Because when you examine the actions taken under these orders—not the rhetoric, not the press releases, but the actual physical acts of removal, deletion, and erasure—a pattern emerges that is impossible to misread.
The Erasure of African American History
Philadelphia: The President’s House
In January 2026, National Park Service crews descended on the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia and physically removed thirteen interpretive panels from the exhibit titled “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” The panels documented the lives of nine people enslaved by George and Martha Washington during the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. Among the stories told was that of Oney Judge, who famously escaped bondage and remained free despite Washington’s repeated attempts to recapture her. Workers used crowbars. [6]
This exhibit was the product of eight years of activism by attorney Michael Coard and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition. It was the first slavery memorial of its kind on federal property in the history of the United States. It was not a theory. It was not ideology. It was a biographical fact about real human beings who lived, worked, suffered, and in some cases escaped from that specific location. The Interior Department justified the removal by saying the panels did not align with “shared national values”—and then called Philadelphia’s lawsuit to restore them “frivolous,” aimed at “demeaning our brave Founding Fathers.” [7]
On Presidents’ Day—February 16, 2026—U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a forty-page opinion ordering the exhibit restored. She opened with George Orwell: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.” The judge ruled the removal “arbitrary and capricious” and found it caused “irreparable harm.” [8]
Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
In February 2025, the National Park Service rewrote its webpage on the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman’s photograph was removed from the top of the page. Her famous declaration—“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger”—was deleted. References to “enslaved” people and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 were scrubbed. The revised page described the Underground Railroad as a movement that “bridged divides of race, religion, sectional differences, and nationality” and “joined the American ideals of liberty and freedom.” They took Harriet Tubman off her own page and replaced her with a postage stamp. [9]
After sustained public outrage, the NPS restored the original page, claiming the changes were made “without approval from NPS leadership nor Department leadership.” [10] This has become the administration’s standard defense: deny, restore quietly, claim it was unauthorized, and continue the broader campaign without pause.
Martin Luther King Jr.: Systematic Diminishment
The administration’s treatment of Dr. King’s legacy is not a single act but a pattern of deliberate diminishment. Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office in the summer of 2025. The bust, created by African American artist Charles Alston in 1970, had been on long-term loan from the Smithsonian since 2000 and was the first image of an African American on public display at the White House. It had occupied a prominent place in the Oval Office since the Obama administration. A White House official claimed it was moved to the president’s private dining room; no photographic evidence was provided. [11]
The Department of the Interior identified approximately eighty items for removal at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail—the route where Dr. King led marches in support of the Voting Rights Act. Materials related to slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow were also flagged at a diverse range of parks, including the National Mall. The National Parks Conservation Association reported that “when you look at the totality of everything identified throughout the parks system, African American history is being targeted more than anything.” [12]
The National Museum of African American History and Culture returned loaned artifacts from civil rights leader Reverend Amos Brown, including his father’s Bible, which Brown took to demonstrations with Dr. King, and George W. Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America 1618–1880, one of the first books to document racism in America. The museum told Brown the items were being returned too preserve them and not display them for too long.” Brown called the explanation a “flimsy excuse.” [13]
The Defense Intelligence Agency ordered a pause on all activities and events related to MLK Day. The DIA also paused programming for Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and other “special observances” to comply with Trump’s executive order. [12] And the Interior Department removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from the 2026 National Parks free-entry days—replacing them with Trump’s birthday (which falls on Flag Day), Constitution Day, and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday. [14]
The Pentagon’s Digital Purge
In March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a department-wide “digital content refresh.” The result was the removal of thousands of webpages, articles, photographs, and videos. Among them: pages honoring Jackie Robinson’s military service, the Tuskegee Airmen, Vietnam-era Medal of Honor recipient Major General Charles Calvin Rogers, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Japanese American 442nd Combat Regiment, history-making female fighter pilots, and the Marines at Iwo Jima. The Enola Gay was flagged because the word “gay” appeared in its name. Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed information about Black, Hispanic, and female troops from its “Notable Graves” website. [15]
Pentagon officials later acknowledged that automated keyword searches—targeting terms like “gay,” “bias,” and “female”—had swept up content that had nothing to do with DEI policy. Tens of thousands of posts were deleted. Some pages were restored after public outcry. Officials warned that many posts tagged for removal in error may be gone permanently. The Pentagon’s own spokesman eventually conceded: “History is not DEI.” [16]
The Netherlands: Black Liberators Erased Abroad
At the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten—the final resting place for more than 8,300 American service members who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis—the American Battle Monuments Commission quietly removed two panels honoring Black soldiers. One told the story of George H. Pruitt, a twenty-three-year-old Black soldier who drowned trying to rescue a comrade. The other, titled “African American Servicemembers in WWII: Fighting on Two Fronts,” described how Black troops fought both the Germans abroad and racism at home. [17]
Internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the agency’s secretary asked whether displays about African American and Native American troops might “get us in trouble” under Trump’s DEI orders. A senior staffer replied that he had already scrubbed the agency’s website and warned that the Margraten panel was “a problem.” Dutch officials called the removal “indecent and unacceptable.” The families of the soldiers were not notified. [18]
The War on the Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum, education, and research complex in the world: twenty-one museums, twenty-one libraries, the National Zoo, and more than 137 million objects covering art, history, culture, and science. Nearly seventeen million people visit annually. Admission is free. It is not a federal agency—it is a public-private partnership. And it is under sustained assault from the White House. [19]
In August 2025, the White House ordered a “comprehensive internal review” of eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Portrait Gallery. The review demanded full catalogs of all current and ongoing exhibitions, budgets, traveling exhibitions, internal guidelines, staff manuals, job descriptions, and organizational charts. The administration set thirty, seventy-five, and one-hundred-twenty-day compliance targets, with the threat of funding cuts for non-compliance. [20]
The White House published a list of exhibits it deemed objectionable under the heading “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.” The list targeted works at the National Museum of African American History and Culture referencing “white dominant culture,” an art piece at the National Museum of African Art referencing enslaved Black people thrown into the sea during the Middle Passage, the work of Howard University professor Ibram X. Kendi (labeled a “hardcore woke activist”), and painter Rigoberto González’s work depicting immigrants crossing the border wall. [21]
Trump himself stated publicly that the Smithsonian was too focused on “how horrible our country is and how bad slavery was—nothing about success, brightness, or the future.” White House official Lindsey Halligan, leading the overhaul, argued on Fox News that the museum’s exhibit “an overemphasis on slavery” and should emphasize “how far we’ve come since slavery.” [22]
Painter Amy Sherald—the artist who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait—canceled what would have been the first-ever solo exhibition of a Black female artist at the National Portrait Gallery since it opened in 1968. Sherald said the museum had raised concerns about her painting Trans Forming Liberty, a portrait of a trans woman posed as the Statue of Liberty, and that “institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role.” The New York Times reported the museum’s caution was an effort “to avoid provoking President Trump.” [23]
Trump’s 2026 budget proposal excluded funding for two Smithsonian institutions: the National Museum of the American Latino and the Anacostia Community Museum, which was founded in 1967 to expand outreach to Black residents in Washington, D.C. [24] The Interior Department also ordered parks to remove any merchandise related to DEI from gift shops. The Gullah Geechee sweetgrass baskets currently displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture—representing a three-hundred-year-old tradition tracing back to enslaved Africans—were identified as potentially subject to removal. [25]
The Erasure of Native American History
At the Grand Canyon, signage was removed that told visitors how settlers pushed Native American tribes off their land for the park to be establishe,d and exploited the landscape for mining and grazing. At Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska, a panel about missionaries who sought to destroy the language and culture of Alaska Natives and forcefully remove them from their lands was flagged for review. [26]
The National Museum of the American Indian was included in the first phase of the Smithsonian review. Pentagon webpages honoring the Navajo Code Talkers—whose encrypted communications in the Pacific Theater were never broken by the Japanese and are credited with saving countless American lives—were deleted as part of the DEI keyword sweep. The Navajo Code Talkers did not fight for diversity. They fought for the United States of America, in a language that could not be decoded precisely because it belonged to a people this country had spent centuries trying to destroy. [15]
The Erasure of LGBTQ+ History
In February 2025, the National Park Service removed the words “transgender” and “queer” from its webpage about the Stonewall National Monument—the site of the 1969 uprising that catalyzed the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. References to transgender people were deleted despite several trans women of color being key figures in the rebellion. In February 2026, a rainbow flag was removed from the physical site. [27]
The executive order specifically targeted the forthcoming American Women’s History Museum—which does not yet have a physical building—ordering that it not “recognize men as women,” the administration’s framing of transgender women. [4] Defense Secretary Hegseth renamed the USNS Harvey Milk—named for one of America’s first openly gay elected officials, assassinated in 1978—claiming to “take politics out of ship naming.” Apparently, honoring a man murdered for who he was constitutes “politics.” Restoring a Confederate monument does not. [28]
What Was Restored
While every action described above involved removal, the administration was simultaneously in the business of restoration—but only for a very specific kind of history.
The Confederate “Reconciliation Monument” is being returned to Arlington National Cemeterforof ten million dollars. The monument features a Black “mammy” holding a white officer’s child and what appears to be a slave following his master to war. A bipartisan congressional commission called it a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery” and “problematic from top to bottom.” Defense Secretary Hegseth announced its return by declaring, “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings.” [29]
A statue of Confederate General Albert Pike—who resigned in disgrace after committing war crimes during the Civil War—is being reinstalled in Washington, D.C. Several Army bases that had been renamed to remove Confederate associations under a bipartisan congressional mandate have been reverted to their original names, with a thin cosmetic distinction: the administration claims the bases now honor different people who happen to share the same surnames as the Confederate generals. [30]
The juxtaposition speaks for itself. Panels honoring Black soldiers who died fighting Nazis: removed as a “problem.” A Confederate monument sanitizing slavery: restored at taxpayer expense. If that does not clarify the meaning of “shared national values,” nothing will.
The Enforcement Pattern
The erasure of non-white history from public institutions is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening alongside an immigration enforcement regime that has fundamentally changed its character, its targets, and its methods.
On January 20, 2025, the administration rescinded the longstanding “protected areas” policy that had prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement from conducting arrests in schools, hospitals, churches, and courthouses. [31] The consequences have been documented. By the summer of 2025, ICE operations were targeting people at courthouses, routine check-ins, homes, workplaces, schools, and churches across the country. In San Diego alone, immigration arrests surged by nearly 1,500 percent between May and October 2025 compared to the same period the prior year. [32]
Federal data tells a stark story. More than seventy-five percent of people booked into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction other than immigration or traffic-related offenses. The number of people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day increased by 2,450 percent. ICE’s “at-large” arrests in American communities increased by 600 percent. The White House pressured ICE to escalate community raids to reach 3,000 arrests per day. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record. [33]
When you erase the historical contributions of immigrants and communities of color from the national record while simultaneously deploying this kind of enforcement, you are not merely executing policy. You are constructing an ideological framework that makes it easier to treat those communities as less than fully American. The narrative precedes the action. It always has.
Let the Record Speak
Governor Moore said it well: “I think his actions probably give the answer before he even has a chance to answer it himself.” He also said something else that deserves attention. When Trump declared that Moore was “not worthy” of an invitation to the White House, Moore responded: “You do not determine my worthiness. God determines my worthiness.” [1]
That is the posture of a man who does not need the approval of power to know who he is. And it is the posture this country needs right now.
I said I would let the evidence speak for itself, and I have. But I will also say this plainly: when an administration removes the stories of enslaved people from the site where they were enslaved; when it deletes Harriet Tubman from the Underground Railroad; when it removes Dr. King’s bust from the Oval Office, flags eighty items for removal at the Selma march trail, returns a civil rights leader’s Bible from the African American museum, and replaces MLK Day with the president’s birthday on the national parks calendar; when it strips the contributions of Black soldiers from military cemeteries on two continents; when it erases Native American displacement from the Grand Canyon and transgender Americans from the Stonewall Monument; when it attempts to defund the National Museum of the American Latino and the Anacostia Community Museum; when it spends ten million dollars to restore a Confederate monument that depicts enslaved people as loyal and content; when the president posts a video depicting the first Black president and his wife as apes during Black History Month and refuses to apologize—I do not know how any honest, intellectually serious person, white or Black, can look at that record and call it anything other than what it is.
This is not a partisan observation. This is a matter of documented fact. The phrase “shared national values” has been operationally defined by this administration, and its definition is this: a version of American history in which the contributions and suffering of non-white, non-heterosexual Americans are treated as ideological intrusions rather than factual record.
This country is not white. It is not Black. It is not Indian, Asian, or Hispanic. It is a country built by immigrants from every corner of the world, on land taken from the people who were here first, with labor extracted from people who were brought here in chains. That is not ideology. That is the documented, verifiable, architectural truth of the American experiment. And any leader who seeks to whitewash that record—while simultaneously restoring monuments to the Confederacy—is not preserving shared values. He is imposing a singular one. And if that does not speak to white nationalism, I do not know what does.
You decide. But understand this: silence in the face of documented erasure is not neutrality. It is an agreement.
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and life—not from theory, but from decades of lived experience.
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