In the news this week, the President’s birthday was added to the list of free entry days at the National Parks, meanwhile Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth were removed from the list. On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by activist and scholar Nicholas Powers to talk about the Trump administration’s attacks on Black history and his latest article for Truthout, “Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It.”

Powers says that the Trump Administration is waging attacks on Black history at three levels: the economic, the cultural, and through voting rights. The closed doors of the African American History Museum in DC are both a symbolic and material closing off of Black history and culture. And that’s added to the mass firings of more than 300,000 Black employees from their federal positions.

The Trump administration is also criminalizing the teaching of Black history in schools. Attacking school curriculum gives permission to conservative activists who are now rewarded for promoting greater and greater acts of racism. The softening or erasing of the historical reality of American slavery and racism creates what Powers calls “a cartoon image of the nation,” one in which the US is presented as a nation always living up to its values.

In Black history, Powers says, there is an opposing grand narrative to the American Dream, that of the American nightmare. He says we need a vision of “American realism” that is taught by Black history: that Black Americans belong here through their blood sweat and tears and that we’re all equal in the eyes of god. Moreover, Black history has a transformative effect, empowering people to see more clearly the strategies and tactics that Black people used to gain greater freedom. Powers previews that there’s another social movement, another wave, on its way to counter the reactionary work of the Right. When it arrives, we should add ourselves to it so that it becomes stronger. 

Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

Featured image of the facade of the National Museum of African American History and Culture by Ron Cogswell via Flickr. 

The post The Transformative Power of Black History with Nicholas Powers appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.