07/08/2026
I had the pleasure of meeting him at the museum years ago. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of books and souvenirs for Heritage Collegiate Leadership Academy. He is such a scholar and a true gentleman.
Dr. Kashi Levette Bazemore
The Attack on Dr. Lonnie Bunch III Is an Attack on Black History
The White House’s July 4, 2026 report is not simply a critique of a museum. It is a calculated attempt to delegitimize Black historical scholarship, undermine one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions, and reassert political control over historical memory.
While presented as an effort to “restore truth and sanity to American history,” the report instead reflects a long American tradition of deception, deflection, marginalization, suppression, and erasure—strategies that have repeatedly been deployed whenever Black Americans have claimed the authority to tell their own history.
Its principal target is not merely the Smithsonian Institution. It is Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, the first Black American to lead the Smithsonian and the visionary who transformed the dream of the National Museum of African American History and Culture into one of the most visited museums in the world. That is no coincidence—it’s targeted and calculated for maximum destruction.
Throughout American history, whenever Black scholars, educators, and institutions have challenged dominant historical narratives with documented evidence, they have themselves become the target.
This moment is not about exhibits. It is about authority to tell America’s story to appease white comfort and the image of “whiteness” as without stain, pure, righteous, noble, godly.
Who has the authority to define America? Who has the authority to determine which stories are patriotic and which are dangerous? Who decides whose memories deserve preservation and whose experiences deserve omission? History has shown that White Americans view themselves as the final arbitrators of what is patriotic, what is American, what is truthful American history.
The report confirms such by suggesting that historians who present complexity, contradiction, and historical injustice cannot be trusted—they “hate America.”. It portrays scholarship itself as political whenever that scholarship refuses to sanitize the nation’s past—Black history is labeled as subversive, radical, anti-American. The aim is to turn historical evidence into anti-American ideology and historians into political adversaries in need of removal.
Dr. Bunch’s response could not have been more consistent with the historical profession: “History is really about ambiguity, complexity, nuance, debate. My goal is that history is driven by scholarship, not partisanship.” He’s trying to remain scholarly in the face of a pack of hyenas looking for blood.
His statement captures the essence of historical inquiry: history driven by scholarship. What he didn’t say was “not by partisanship driven by white supremacist ideology.” He couldn’t say the obvious.
History is no longer judged by documentary evidence, archival research, or peer-reviewed interpretation. It is judged by whether it reinforces a preferred national narrative rooted in white supremacy.
This strategy is not new. For centuries, white supremacist ideology has depended upon controlling historical memory and cultural knowledge—Dr. Carter G. Woodson spoke to this. Enslaved Africans were forbidden to read because literacy threatened the institution of slavery. Following Reconstruction, the Lost Cause movement rewrote the Civil War into a noble defense of states’ rights while minimizing slavery as its central cause. Textbooks celebrated enslavers as benevolent patriarchs while portraying Reconstruction as a tragic mistake. Jim Crow segregation depended not only upon legal discrimination but also upon historical deception. The destruction of prosperous Black communities—from Tulsa Race Massacre to Detroit’s Black Bottom—was either ignored or justified in official narratives. Black intellectual achievement was routinely marginalized because acknowledging it undermined the myth of white racial superiority.
Each generation has witnessed a struggle over historical truth. Each generation has witnessed efforts to determine whose history deserves legitimacy. The attack on Lonnie Bunch belongs squarely within that historical tradition. Its methods are familiar when you study the historical pattern.
1. First comes deception. The language of “restoring truth” suggests that historians have abandoned objective inquiry, despite the Smithsonian’s long-standing commitment to independent scholarship and rigorous historical standards.
2. Then comes deflection. Rather than confronting the overwhelming documentary evidence surrounding slavery, segregation, racial violence, housing discrimination, educational inequality, and disenfranchisement, critics redirect public attention toward accusations that historians themselves are ideological actors, “radicals” with an anti-American agenda to teach our children to “hate America.”
3. Next comes marginalization. Black scholars become radical activists with an anti-American agenda rather than historians. Black institutions become suspect rather than authoritative. Black historical interpretation becomes framed as divisive rather than indispensable to understanding the American experience.
4. Suppression follows naturally. Calls to reshape governing boards, replace leadership, redirect funding, or redefine institutional missions are not merely administrative decisions. They are mechanisms through which political power attempts to regulate historical interpretation.
5. Finally comes erasure.Not always through burning books or removing artifacts. Sometimes erasure occurs by discrediting the people entrusted with preserving them—this is what’s happening to Dr. Bunch. One need not destroy a museum if the public can first be convinced never to trust what it contains.
Here are the facts. The National Museum of African American History and Culture was never intended to tell only Black history. It demonstrates that Black history is American history. It reveals that democracy has always been expanded through struggle, that freedom has always required contestation, and that the nation’s greatest achievements cannot be understood apart from its greatest contradictions.
To attack that institution is to attack the legitimacy of that understanding.
More troubling still is the broader pattern. Attempts to influence the Smithsonian’s governance through political appointments raise fundamental questions about institutional independence. Similar efforts to reshape cultural and educational institutions suggest a growing willingness to substitute political loyalty for scholarly expertise. This is dangerous and we are seeing this danger played out in real time.
When political leaders determine which historical interpretations are acceptable, museums cease to function as centers of inquiry and instead risk becoming instruments of state-approved memory—and, in this case, state-approved white suoremacy.
This debate therefore extends far beyond one museum or one historian. It concerns whether historical scholarships will remain independent of political power. Whether archives will continue to speak louder than ideology. Whether historical evidence will matter more than a white supremacists narrative, something DuBois and Woodson questioned. Whether Americans possess sufficient confidence in their democracy to confront its triumphs alongside its failures.
The irony is unmistakable. Those who accuse historians of rewriting history are themselves demanding the authority to determine which histories Americans should encounter. Think on that as it’s rooted in the arrogance of white supremacy. That is not historical preservation. It is historical management—actually mismanagement.
History has never been served by censorship disguised as patriotism.
Nor has democracy ever been strengthened by narrowing the nation’s memory.
The attack on Lonnie Bunch is therefore not simply personal. It is an attack on Black intellectual authority. It is an attack on the legitimacy of Black scholarship. It is an attack on an institution built to preserve truths that earlier generations worked tirelessly to conceal. For Black Americans, none of this is unfamiliar.
The effort to control Black history has always been inseparable from the effort to control Black citizenship. Because those who control the past often seek to control the future.
The responsibility of historians is therefore not to comfort political power but to confront it with evidence. That is precisely what Lonnie Bunch has done throughout his career. And that is precisely why his work—and the institution he helped build—matters now more than ever.
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