February 8, 2025
Shaun Harper, a College of Southern California professor, says Trump’s proclamation is ‘incomplete.’
Like most presidents of the previous 30 years, Donald Trump issued a proclamation that acknowledges February as Black Historical past Month, nevertheless, it’s what the proclamation doesn’t point out that has sparked protests from historians and different specialists regarding the proclamation’s sanitized model of Black individuals’s place in American historical past.
In response to The Huffington Submit, Shaun Harper, a professor of schooling, enterprise, and public coverage on the College of Southern California, believes Trump’s Black Historical past Month proclamation is “sanitized” and “incomplete.”
For starters, Trump fails to handle the nation’s historical past of racial discrimination.
“America’s Black historical past consists of slavery, Jim Crow, separate and unequal education, redlining, racial violence, and much too many well-documented inequities,” Harper informed the outlet. “A sanitized proclamation that fails to acknowledge any of that is incomplete and inconsistent with prior years.”
As Harper identified, Trump’s newest Black Historical past Month proclamation incorporates a obscure celebration of “black American patriots who’ve indelibly formed our Nation’s historical past,” solely mentioning Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Tiger Woods by title.
In his feedback to the Huffington Submit, Harper alluded to Trump’s actions gutting range, fairness and inclusion initiatives on the federal authorities and his proclamation affirming Black Historical past Month as disrespectful to Black “heroes and sheroes” of the previous.
“On his first day in workplace, Trump swiftly dismantled authorities places of work and federal packages that intention to proper America’s previous and current wrongs in opposition to Black individuals,” Harper stated. “Don’t want us a Joyful Black Historical past Month after having spat on the graves of Black heroes and sheroes who died in pursuit of unfulfilled guarantees to us. It’s offensive.”
In response to Dr. Kevin Gaines, the interim director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute on the College of Virginia, the very purpose that Black Historical past Month exists is because of efforts by Woodson and others to fight the sort of whitewashed historical past that Trump’s proclamation seems to current to the nation.
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