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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Censoring museums risks diminishing American exceptionalism, experts
warn
By Rebekah Riess, CNN
Updated:
7:00 AM EDT, Wed September 17, 2025
Source: CNN
As museums across the country to scale back a purported
“overemphasis” on difficult subjects like slavery, experts warn
such moves could diminish American exceptionalism and limit national
progress while sidestepping the full historical picture visitors want.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how
horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished
the downtrodden have been,” President Donald Trump in August as he
directed his attorneys to review the non-profit that runs the
nation’s flagship, federally funded .
“Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the
Future,” he added, comparing the review to his .
came weeks after the Smithsonian began its own review to its
“nonpartisan stature” and on the heels of the launch of a to ensure
its “alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American
exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore
confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” his aides wrote.
That order, though, may be misaligned with what American museum-goers
have told researchers: that they want a variety of perspectives and a
complete picture of their shared past – without evident omissions or
sugarcoating.
Beyond that, minimizing or cutting out so-called “bad” history
risks sucking the truth out of America’s story and losing compelling
pieces of a collective identity, experts told CNN. It could also
sideline key knowledge that drives civic advancement and elevates US
standing on the world stage, they said.
With leaders of the Smithsonian vowing to “continue to collaborate
constructively” with the Trump administration, experts in the museum
field are keeping a close eye on how their peers in Washington, DC,
meet this critical moment – while standing their ground against
threats of censorship trickling down from the White House.
“I have great confidence,” US museums pioneer Bryan Stevenson said,
“that this nation is great enough to learn the truth of its history
and still succeed.”
The dangers of censoring the ‘bad’
The White House’s efforts to recast the focus of the Smithsonian –
with its 21 museums and National Zoo -– reflect Trump’s opposition
to what he described in a March executive order as a “revisionist
movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United
States.”
“Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy
of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is
reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise
irredeemably flawed,” states the order titled, “Restoring Truth and
Sanity to American History.”
Minimizing parts of history deemed “bad,” however, does a
disservice to America’s central underdog narrative and lessens
national-level achievements, experts warned.
“It’s just not the same story without the backdrop,” said
Stevenson, executive director of the nonprofit which runs The Legacy
Museum, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Freedom
Monument Sculpture Park that address the US history of slavery,
lynching and racial segregation.
Stevenson points to exhibits at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
African American History and Culture that focus on the accomplishments
of NBA legend Michael Jordan and “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, as
well as the extraordinary achievements of former President Barack Obama
and other African Americans who reached the pinnacles of success in
business, politics, sports and entertainment.
Similar figures – from Revolutionary era hero Crispus Attucks to
flight trailblazer Amelia Earhart – in a “National Garden of
American Heroes” Trump has championed.
“But you won’t appreciate the success of the Tuskegee Airmen, the
Navajo Code Breakers or other people of color who’ve done great
things if you don’t understand the burdens and the barriers and the
obstacles they had to overcome,” Stevenson said.
“We all like stories about people who suffer injuries but recover and
go on and achieve great things, people who fall down but get back
up,” he went on. “But you don’t skip the part about how they were
unfairly targeted, unfairly injured, unfairly held back. You have to
emphasize that to appreciate their achievement.”
US standing in the world is at risk
Key in the Trump administration’s review of the Smithsonian is the
notion that deep historical rifts continue to impact the country in a
negative way, the White House aide leading the process told Fox News
last month.
“There’s a lot of history to our country – both positive and
negative – but we need to keep moving forward,” Lindsey Halligan .
“We can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide
us.”
But minimizing difficult or harmful parts of the nation’s history
could pose a broader potential consequence of “diminishing our
stature as a nation on the international stage,” said John Chrastka,
executive director of a nonpartisan organization working toward
“sustaining libraries as they evolve and grow in the 21st century.”
Most countries have history that is difficult, he said. Owning it,
especially alongside steps to try to make up for systemic injustice,
has become a global mark of distinction from to to .
“I don’t think that we can be a country that’s world-class,”
Chrastka said, “I don’t think we can be a nation that’s mature, I
don’t think we can be a nation that leads amongst other nations, if
we bury our own truths.”
People also need to understand the fulsome truth to make informed
decisions on a range of issues affecting daily life, Stevenson said.
“No one goes to the doctor and tells their doctor, ‘If I have high
blood pressure, if I have diabetes – don’t tell me! I forbid you
from telling me! I don’t want to know about it!’ Because that’s a
recipe for poor health, for early death,” Stevenson explained. “The
way we get better, the way we stay healthy, is by learning the truth
about our history, about our health, about our society, about what’s
a threat, what’s not a threat, and then confronting it and then
overcoming it.”
Taking a position that facets of US history weren’t “‘that
bad,’ even though it’s empirically proven to be ‘that bad’ …
really makes it much more difficult for us to have honest conversations
with each other as neighbors,” Chrastka added.
CNN has reached out to Halligan and the White House for further
comment.
Americans want a range of perspectives
Data from an annual survey of museum-goers, done over the past year in
partnership with the American Alliance of Museums, shows the majority
of participants supported and wanted museums to share inclusive
programming that tells multiple perspectives and gives a full picture
of the country’s history.
While there were significant differences in the responses of
conservative and liberal survey respondents, even then, the majority of
conservatives – in step with liberals – favored inclusive
programming, the survey conducted by Wilkening Consulting shows.
Additionally, a lot of written-in survey comments, along with
qualitative field work, indicated Americans and frequent museum
visitors recognized – and disliked – omissions in curation, said
Susie Wilkening, principal of Wilkening Consulting.
“They want to know what happened in the past, and they don’t want
it to be erased. They don’t want it to be sugarcoated. They don’t
want it to be glossed over. And when it does happen like that, they get
angry,” she said.
“When we omit parts or tell lies of a mission and not tell that
complete story, the public’s aware of it.”
When it came to historical facts, survey-takers tended to find
respondents who were less open to newly uncovered historical
perspectives had narrower parameters for what they considered
“credible facts,” while those who leaned toward more inclusive
museum programming had broader parameters.
“But historians and the people who are doing the work at museums are
in the business of making sure that the things that they’re
presenting in museums are backed up by evidence,” Wilkening noted,
making the case for an expanded view.
“People trust museums because they rely on independent scholarship
and research, uphold high professional standards, and embrace open
inquiry,” the American Alliance of Museums, which represents 35,000
museums and professionals, said in responding to growing threats of
censorship at US museums.
US museum leaders refuse to retreat
Federal action like the pending White House reviews could also have
ripple effects at state and local levels, EveryLibrary .
“If the Smithsonian, a prestigious institution known for its
historical independence, can be compelled to align its content with
political agendas, smaller organizations such as local history museums
and public libraries will likely face increased pressure to modify
their collections, exhibitions, and programs to fit these prevailing
narratives,” its statement reads.
“These pressures can create a chilling effect across the entire
museum sector,” the American Alliance of Museums said in a statement.
In short, “it sets the national tone,” Chrastka told CNN.
Still, Chrastka is optimistic most museums will hold their own, he
said. During the Nazi regime and the Communist era, some German
librarians – and even the national library – collected so-called
“decadent books,” Western books and books considered outside the
official philosophy, he learned recently from a German colleague.
“I don’t think we’re at that point yet in the United States,”
Chrastka said. “But I’d like to hope that individual libraries,
individual museums and individual archives, taken collectively together
in states and regions, can continue to do their jobs, to do what would
they look at as being a statutory obligation to serve the public or an
obligation based on their mission, vision and values to serve the
public despite that kind of pressure that’s coming from the top.”
“We’re just going to continue doing public history work,” the
director of Two Mississippi Museums told reporters in August at an
event announcing a 70 years ago in the United States.
“One of the reasons why the Civil Rights Museum was created is to
tell the unvarnished truth about what happened in terms of the Civil
Rights Movement here in Mississippi, and that’s our mission,”
Michael Morris. “For us, you know, we’re just doing our jobs.”
Stevenson also has no intention of walking back any of what’s on
display the Legacy Sites: “We will not retreat one inch,” he said,
“from talking honestly about history, presenting honestly about
history.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter, Kit Maher, and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn
contributed to this report.
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