Faced with the fast slide into authoritarianism, the embrace of America’s adversaries on the world stage, and a senseless trade war, few might have noticed the G.O.P.’s effort to censor a street mural on city property that it finds offensive. On Tuesday, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel E. Bowser indicated that the city would rename Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House and remove the offending words. Mayor Bowser had the slogan Black Lives Matter painted in huge letters on 16th Street during 2020’s racial justice protests.
Then in the waning months of his first term, President Trump was livid. Now, a Deep South Republican member of Congress has introduced a bill that would withhold millions of dollars in transportation funding unless the city agreed to erase it and rename the plaza. According to The Washington Post, the legislation would require the mayor to adopt the name Liberty Plaza and remove every mention of Black Lives Matter Plaza from city websites and documents. Unfortunately, it appears that Mayor Bowser will give in to the pressure.
This strong-arming in the District of Columbia is part of a push by the right to erase Black Americans’ legacy and humanity. Like the firing of Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Trump regime seems determined to drive the stories of people of color into the shadows.
The White House’s war on “woke” is code for taking the county back to the pre-civil rights era of Jim Crow laws and widespread segregation. It may be just letters painted on a street, but the right’s determination to cover them up exposes a dark undercurrent of racism.
It cannot be factually denied that Black Americans were part of the country’s founding right from the beginning. Here in East Hampton, the Plain Sight Project, of which I am a part, has brought to light the contributions of free and enslaved people of color living, working, loving, and dying here more than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence. We have their names to prove it, and no amount of Republicans’ racist ire can cover up this truth.