Blackwashing

Newsflash:

The Trump administration has ordered the National Park Service to remove multiple exhibits, signs and materials linked to slavery from its sites, including a photograph of a formerly enslaved man with scars on his back that became a defining image of the Civil War era, according to multiple outlets.

The move follows a Trump executive order from March that directed the Department of the Interior to ensure national parks don’t contain content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” in a push to focus on the country’s “greatness” instead.

This is a photograph of a man named Peter Gordon. 

The photo is known as "the scourged back."

Gordon has been whipped and heavily scarred by his former owners or captors.

He was am enslaved man who escaped from Mississippi and reached a Union Army camp in Louisiana in 1863. 

The photograph is attributed to two photographers, McPherson and Oliver, who were in the camp at the time.

But this photo, and many others like it that show a window into the darker past of our country's history, will no longer be accessible at public sites.

Because it makes certain white people feel bad about our legacy and we can't have that, can we?

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I look at the palpable hatred on the white faces during the earliest stages of desegregation and think that perhaps a certain amount of shame is indeed appropriate.

Or better yet, let's sweep it under the rug instead and pretend it never happened.

Wouldn't want to upset anybody.