"Slavery was not that bad" is Trump's newest propaganda line.

 As part of the White Nationalist influence in the GOP, as personified by Project 2025's anti-DEI purpose, now the Trump regime is trying to rewrite official history (revisionism like the Chinese and Russian communists undertook to justify their policies) by pressuring the Smithsonian to stop portraying slavery as so terrible. Trump says the Smithsonian focuses too much on 'how bad slavery was'   Even now, reference to Trump's impeachments is removed from the Smithsonian because of his objections. Trump’s impeachments have been removed from a Smithsonian exhibit, for now : NPR If the Smithsonian complies, it will become the Trump Propaganda History Museum.  Its lies will be revealed by the preservation of the real history of newspaper report archives and of slavery in America by many institutions not dependent on federal funding. This recent outrage, coupled with recruitment appeals to racists to join ICE "to defend your culture", is the newest example of Trump's racist appeal to some of his core supporters.

To bring this up to date, the persistence of these racist attitudes in my native Oklahoma is that the anti-woke attitudes will be taught to their children in school, as all teachers hired from blue states will have to be screened to get teaching jobs for compliance with anti-wokism..Exclusive: Oklahoma to begin controversial test to weed out ‘woke’ teacher applicants today | CNN Politics  Oklahoma by any measure ranks lowest in education, near the bottom of the 50 states. Oklahoma schools ranked nearly the worst in the nation in new study  Whatever education their children get will now be MAGA's view.  Oklahoma has already banned  DEI on higher education campuses.  DEI ban on Oklahoma college campuses signed into law • Oklahoma Voice.   Nearly 8% of Oklahoma's population in African-American per Google AI, and Tulsa was the site of the most famous racial massacre of blacks  by whites,( Greenwood, 1921), in US history per Wikipedia..

 What is so horrible about this newest example of the racism element in Trump's MAGA movement to paint slavery as not that bad is that slavery has been a part of human history forever, and usually those enslaved were bounty and victims of a lost war, regardless of race or religion, but the uniqueness of American slavery is that those enslaved were of a particular race and color, enslaved because they were considered inferior, less intelligent, less competent, for one reason, because they were black.

. I remember my days growing up as a little white girl in a Jim Crow-like culture in Oklahoma, where I was sat down, not my parents, but by my music teacher,  and told  Negroes were descended from monkeys and were just not equal to white people. I was 12 or so in the early 1950s.  I had been told by my parents, who were from the north, that black people were every bit as smart and intelligent as white people.  They were human beings like us and deserved to be treated likewise.

 There were two attitudes I heard expressed by other adults then, too. It was either that they deserved being cared for because they were inferior to us whites, a paternalistic holiness; after all they got free food, clothing, and housing, and medical care. Say what? Here is what I know. This was in return for work with no pay, rape, beatings of the slackers, and death to those who revolted. Slaves were property.  Starving and sick and unable to work were of no value. Rebellious slaves were to be feared.  Negroes were to be controlled by violence, lynching,  and brute force to keep them in their place. (I am using the word "Negroes"; that was the term used in "polite" white people's conversation then; the "n" word was in more common and open usage.).  Whether Trump himself is like that, he is careful with his words, is a matter of deduction and surmise, but with such statements, he reflects some of those same racist attitudes held in the ruby red south that  I remember from growing up in that culture.  Cudos to  Joe Scarborough on MSNBC today, that those who deny the awfulness of human slavery in the US are like the holocaust deniers.  He is right: both deniers are ...trying to erase the guilt of their participating or approving in acts that are the worst examples of an awful side of human nature.