At some point, the desire to offer a more complex and truthful picture of America’s past morphed into an unsparing iconoclasm. Fragments from the news and my own experiences confirm that change. A school district in New Jersey, I learned, had erased the names of all holidays from its calendar because too many of them were associated with racism. The first to receive this treatment was Columbus Day. But where would it stop? Every holiday could be associated with some kind of oppression. No more Thanksgiving? No more Presidents’ Day? Other school districts were making similar choices. An elementary school in Seattle canceled its Halloween parade because it allegedly marginalized students of color. San Francisco’s board of education approved a plan (eventually reversed) to rename schools honoring historical figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the grounds that they were racists.
Then I read about the efforts around the country to tear down statues of Thomas Jefferson. The call to remove the Jefferson Memorial, it turns out, was not issued by some lone voice; it was part of a movement to get Jefferson out of our public places. In Portland, Oregon, activists took down statues of Jefferson and Washington. After the New York City Council voted to remove a statue of Jefferson from its chambers, where it had stood for over a century, Assemblyman Charles Barron was asked where the statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence might belong. His response: “I don’t think it should go anywhere. I don’t think it should exist…I think it should be put in storage or destroyed or whatever.” To Barron, Jefferson’s statue deserved the same fate as that of King George III, which stood in New York City’s Bowling Green Park until torn down during the American Revolution.
According to this extreme revisionist—and what I call post-American—perspective, we need an entirely new accounting of the past, not because the history we currently teach is incomplete but because all of American history is a lie. As post-Americans see it, this nation was founded on racism and is defined by racism. It is not just that America has a long history of racism. It is that America exists for, and because of, racism. It is a country for white people. White supremacy is its defining feature. The story of America was “stamped from the beginning,” in historian and activist Ibram X. Kendi’s words.
The post-American perspective does not simply provide a new interpretation of American history. The problem that it claims to address is not the kind that can be solved by adding greater complexity or a fuller picture of race-based exploitation to the story. At the base of its historiographical ambitions is a stunning assertion: For those who seek social justice, American history does not belong to them and they do not belong to it. There is, in short, no usable past. In that spirit, an Illinois state legislator called for “the abolishment of history classes” in the state’s public schools because the course materials “lead to white privilege and a racist society.”