There are the facts of history and there are the fibs of propaganda. Human beings are inclined to propaganda about the dreadful past. We are inclined to produce and consume false stories about ourselves, our ancestors, our nations to put us in a better light.
No, we could not possibly have done that. It couldn’t have been that bad. We don’t have that level of sadism in us.
There are Germans who don’t believe that the Holocaust ever took place, at least in quite the deliberate and brutal way the genocide of European Jews has been recorded and documented in history. These might be people whose parents or grandparents were Nazis. And so, the stain of action (or inaction) is too much to bear. Maybe they identify ideologically with Nazis. Maybe they are the rising cohort of neo-Nazis in parties like AfD, casting peoples of color as Europe’s internal enemies in the manner Nazis cast Jews. Maybe they can only picture their homeland in a grand light.
But to publicly deny that the Holocaust took place, or downplay it, or attempt to explain it away, is illegal in Germany. It is illegal for a reason, so Germans never forget what Germans—all human groups—are capable of.
Which brings us to Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the Fourth of July. Those “who tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors” are peddling “Marx’s lies about our heritage,” he said. “They’re doing something much worse than slandering our past, they are slandering and attacking our future.”
The next day, on the Fourth of July, the White House issued a 162-page report denouncing the exhibition of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The report’s first “key finding”: the Museum is failing to deny the connections of “America’s Founders and Founding” to slavery.
The Trump administration has been denouncing the Smithsonian Institution for nearly a year. It all started when the administration ordered a “review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions” on August 12, 2025. A week later, Trump posted: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”
This is slavery denial.
Slavery denial is akin to Holocaust denial, which “is any attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jews,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews. Holocaust denial and distortion generally claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.”
In the context of the United States, slavery denial is any attempt to refute or censor the facts of the ruthless enslavement of African Americans and slavery’s ongoing legacy through its surviving eldest child: racism.
Slavery denial is one of the most hurtful and harmful anti-Black racist ideas.
Slavery denial contends that the centrality, horrors, and legacies of American slavery are being embellished by those who hate America as part of their scheme to destroy America.
Slavery denial casts as ideological, as unpatriotic, as anti-American, as anti-White all people and institutions who tell or acknowledge the facts of American slavery and its legacy. The title of the White House report conveys it all: “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
The slavery denial is far-reaching. There’s a litany of facts about American slavery that Americans are dodging, negating and censoring. Like slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Like the role of slavery in the development of American capitalism. Like the defense of slavery and racism as the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Like the enormous wealth White Americans accumulated from the voracious plunder of Black bodies and minds. Like the reinvesting of slavery’s profits in industries and corporations that have endured into the twenty-first century, including the nation’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase.
Perhaps the most popular form of slavery denial: Everybody was doing it for a long time. “You realize that slavery is thousands of years old,” fitness trainer turned influencer, Jillian Michaels, said on CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip last summer.
Another popular claim: slavery was bad everywhere. “A lot of people would like us to think it’s the original sin in American history,” said Donald Frazier, a member of a board that advised the Texas State Board of Education on the new standards for K-8 social studies it approved on June 26. “This is a liberating opportunity for our Texas school kids to understand that this is a bad deal, and this was a bad deal all over the place.”
Texas teachers are now required to emphasize that slavery is an ancient and global institution. They must teach about slavery in “early indigenous civilizations in Texas, the Roman Empire, African kingdoms, the Vikings and medieval Muslims.”
When every society across time and space can be held responsible, no society can be held responsible. When no society can be held responsible, the United States can’t be held responsible. When the United States can’t be held responsible, White Americans can’t be held responsible. Which allows slavery denial’s ultimate proclamation: White American leaders were not responsible for the existence of slavery in the United States but they were primarily responsible for its abolition.
Take the White House’s report from July 4th. The National Museum of American History “should tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices,” it stated, “but also how the words, actions, and ideas of America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.” After shackling nearly half a million people in 1776, the United States shackled nearly four million Black people, the largest enslaved population in the Western hemisphere on the eve of the Civil War. Wrenching approximately one million enslaved Black people from their families over the decades, the United States had the biggest domestic human trade in world history. The United States ended up being one of the last countries in the Americas to abolish chattel slavery.
Slavery denial has disputed even the most basic fact of American slavery, often with acrobatic sophistry that might seem comical except that it’s completely serious. There’s the argument that Black people just happened to be enslaved. “Slavery. . .was not about the color of the skin of the slaves but their value as workers on the plantations,” New Hampshire state representative Werner Horn claimed in 2019. They “weren’t enslaving black people because they were black.” And yet, somehow, no White people ended up enslaved in the United States.
Then there are people who say slavery itself wasn’t so bad for these just-so-happened-to-be-enslaved Black people. These so-called “workers on plantations” acquired “skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” as Florida State Board of Education instructed students to learn in 2023. Perhaps these skills explained in part how, according to commentator Matt Walsh: “it seems rather clear that Black Americans are doing better here today than they would be had their ancestors generations ago never been brought to these shores.”
The administration removed exhibits on slavery at the President’s House in Philadelphia, and plans to replace them with panels that imply the presidential enslavers were benevolent. “Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets,” as one proposed panel states. This is one example of countless exhibits and teaching materials in the National Park Service that the Trump administration has censored over the last year.
As for the vast profits derived from slavery, they were “largely consumed by the miscreants who extracted them from the backs of slaves,” argued Richard Epstein, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, in his rebuttal to “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014. “At most a small sliver of wealth was passed down by inheritance for a generation or two,” Epstein claimed. “No fund of wealth survives the demise of slavery and Jim Crow.” In fact, journalist David Montero recently detailed how most of the profits derived from slavery went to Northern businesses, particularly financial institutions, which reinvested the wealth in industries and corporations that survive to this day.
Slavery denial and Holocaust denial are types of historical denial that form the gutter of hate. The gutter of hate concealing the total suffering of a people—as slavery and the Holocaust did. The gutter of hate denying or downplaying the past total suffering of a people—as slavery denial and Holocaust denial do.
A gutter of hate that contains historical denial and presentist denial. Denying climate change. Denying anti-Black racism. Denying the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli occupation forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Presentist denial, like historical denial, preserves power, not comfort. The primary function of slavery denial has not been about the preservation of good feelings, of White comfort. I suspect many of the White people indoctrinated into slavery denial feel the worst about slavery, feel the most discomfort viewing exhibits of slavery. Because in their slavery denial, in their homogenous historical conception of White people, I suspect they can’t help but identify with White enslavers amid their false projections “that only less than 2% of White Americans owned slaves,” to quote Jillian Michaels again. I suspect they can’t help but assume their White children will identify with White enslavers. And feel bad and guilty. Which signals another element of slavery denial: the sidelining of White abolitionists.
Any White American adult or child, whether a descendant of an enslaver or not, can identify with that small minority of White people who actively fought against slavery from the Germantown petitioners in 1688, or the Grimké sisters who forsook their enslaving family, or Malcolm X’s favorite warrior, Captain John Brown. White adults and children can see themselves when they look at White abolitionists in exhibits. They can stare and seethe at the White enslavers in exhibits.
But slavery denial seemingly desires for Americans to look upon the enslaving “Founders” — not the abolitionists at the time — as “heroes,” to quote Trump. Even as 48 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence directly profited from slavery, as the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study found in a new study.
Why are Trump and his allies so bent on Americans looking upon the wealthy White enslavers as heroes? Maybe so Americans will look upon as heroes the wealthy White authoritarians who rule the nation’s political economy today. Maybe because many of the actual abolitionists recognized that the fight against slavery necessitated a fight against racism. Maybe because erasing antislavery White Americans drains a fountain of inspiration for today’s antiracist White Americans, particularly those who support reparative policies that address the generational harms of slavery.
Is that another smoking gun? Slavery denial almost certainly sustains opposition to reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Opposition even from Black Americans.
To erase antislavery Black Americans—another element of slavery denial—is to drain a fountain of inspiration from today’s antiracist Black Americans. African Americans, too, can learn about slavery and feel ashamed. I am not the only African American who feels ashamed when recalling that small minority of slaves who snitched on leaders of rebellions like Denmark Vesey, or who Harriet Tubman reportedly had to threaten with her pistol that the Underground Railroad rolled in only one direction: to freedom.
So, even if one of those slaves were one of my ancestors, I do not identify with them. I identify with the enslaved African Americans like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass who resisted assaults, who resisted enslavement, who freed themselves, who attempted to free others.
We can all identify with those Americans who believed the impossible was possible: the abolition of chattel slavery. And organized for four hundred years. And achieved it. We can all emerge from exhibits of slavery and abolition in books and museums and libraries and streets and classrooms feeling inspired to believe the impossible is possible again: the abolition of racism. And organize for it. And one day achieve it.
And yet, I suspect Trump did not have this in mind when he criticized the Smithsonian last summer for focusing too much on slavery and having, “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” I suspect he did not have the abolitionists of 1776 in mind when he stood near Mount Rushmore on the eve of the 250th and declared, “The American founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history.”
