by Daniel Johnson
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, nonetheless, it’s what the proclamation doesn’t point out that has sparked protests from historians and different consultants in regards to the proclamation’s sanitized model of Black folks’s place in American historical past.
In accordance with The Huffington Put up, Shaun Harper, a professor of training, 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 deal with the nation’s historical past of racial discrimination.
“America’s Black historical past contains slavery, Jim Crow, separate and unequal education, redlining, racial violence, and much too many well-documented inequities,” Harper advised 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 imprecise 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 Put up, 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 workplaces and federal applications that purpose to proper America’s previous and current wrongs towards Black folks,” Harper mentioned. “Don’t want us a Completely satisfied 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 accordance with Dr. Kevin Gaines, the interim director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute on the College of Virginia, the very motive 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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