In chapter 17 of his seminal work Black Reconstruction in America, titled “The Propaganda of History,” W.E.B. DuBois details the lessons American school children and college students are learning about the Reconstruction Era in the 1930s, according to the textbooks and “historians” of the time.
He mentions three dominant theses: (1) all Black people were ignorant; ignorant of the way things are done in all manner of business e.g. politics, finance, actual business, etc., (2) all Black people were lazy, dishonest and extravagant; like children, Black people’s only discipline was to their selfish desire, oblivious to any higher cause than self, and (3) Black people were the reason for bad government established during the Reconstruction Era.
This is propaganda; the sort of propaganda Black historians and educators sought to debunk. And they did in many cases. The work of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history, and the sociologist and historian W.E.B. DuBois worked to debunk and did debunk the irreverent propaganda of white folks against Black people. But it did not come without backlash. DuBois was asked to submit an essay on the history of Black people to Encyclopedia Britannica. He made numerous mentions of Black people during the Reconstruction Era. They were removed. DuBois requested that this remain part of the essay:
“White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools.”
When Britannica ruled that they would not honor DuBois’ request, he refused to allow his article to appear at all. This is the tradition that Black historians, including Robin D.G. Kelley, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor descend from.
The Trump Administration, too, is well aware of this tradition of Black historian truth tellers.
They also descend from a tradition: a tradition of white supremacist propagandizers who manipulate history to justify anti-Black racism found in public policy and laws. Such is the support behind executive orders and Supreme Court decisions that strike at the very human rights of Black people. Recently, Donald Trump shared more propaganda with the New York Times about the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump said that as a result of the movement:
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college. So, I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases… “I think it was also, at the same time, it accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people — people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So, it was, it was a reverse discrimination.”
This is an example of the propaganda of history. I define the propaganda of history, borrowing from DuBois, as the most stupendous effort involving white institutional spaces and systems to discredit African Americans as human beings. It is the work of discrediting and disavowing Black history, culture, and humanity: the mind, body, and spirit.
I am unsure of what led Trump to offer his thoughts to the New York Times. Maybe it was the continuing pressure of the public and congressmen (some in his own party) over the Epstein files. Maybe it was the Supreme Court that denied the Trump Administration’s ability to federalize the National Guard in Chicago.
Maybe it was the embarrassment from the release of the transcript of former special prosecutor Jack Smith’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, where he said, “that Donald Trump engaged in a criminals scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election to prevent the lawful transfer of power [and] retain highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021.”
Whatever it was, it led to a fury of events that where Americans have witnessed the illegal capture (kidnapping by force) of the leader of a sovereign nation, threats to takeover other sovereign nations including Greenland, Cuba, and Columbia, intervene in the civil unrest in Iran, and deploying thousands of ICE agents in Minneapolis, MN, resulting in a man shot in the leg, another blinded in one eye and the murders of Keith Porter Jr., and Renee Nicole Good.
I suppose Trump’s interview with the Times was icing on the cake.
But it’s not. The work of propagandizing history is the work of picking the pockets of white people to believe that their enemy is Black and brown people.
The work of discrediting, dismissing, and erasing is to justify the very codified anti-Black racism that builds white wealth, asserts white value tangibly and intangibly, and establishes and maintains the white power structure—not for the masses of white people; only the members of the plutocrat class. That’s what preventing the teaching of Black history and striking down DEI is all about.
What’s left for the masses of white people was a bribe, according to DuBois, where they were allowed their share of “wealth, power, and luxury… on a scale the world never saw before.” They benefited from this accumulated wealth from the “darker nations of the world [through cross-class consent] for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them.”
Reading that, racial pseudoscience like eugenics starts to make sense.
History shows us that, unfortunately, white people often fall for the trap of leaning into racism because, in many of their minds, people of color “getting ahead” means they are getting left behind. Brazilian sociologist Paulo Freire explains it better:
“Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven.”
So, it is no accident that Trump said this. He’s priming his base for 2026 and 2028. The rising cost of goods resulting from Trump’s tariffs, the rising cost of insurance, and the loss of employment have the MAGA base feeling pain. So, the return to racism is the elixir that Trump convinces them will make them well. But racism only makes everybody sick. DuBois leaves us with a challenge that the whole of society must wrestle with. How we answer will determine our path forward:
“If the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.
If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish…
We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.”
America cannot be saved until it has a society that regards the truth as more important than the defense of the white race. If that can’t happen, it proves that America was never what it said that it was on paper; that America is who it truly is in them streets.
