White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942. Photograph Source: Arthur S. Siegel – Public Domain

“Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

—Toni Morrison, “Making America White Again,” 2016

“We had a meeting, and I say, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden. Just a few, let’s have a few. From Denmark. Mind sending us your people? Send us some nice people, you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships” (emphasis added).

–President Donald J. Trump, 2025, who has approved the slaughter of over 80 people on boats at sea

Trump has made clear his intention to make America white again, although, America has never has been exclusively white. What he means, of course, is ensuring that white people retain political and cultural dominance, a project central to the country’s ethos even before the Founding Fathers. Here the “most transparent president in American history” is unequivocally clear.

This project entails diminishing and erasing the history and contributions of black[1] people and other communities of color have made to the country, while dramatically reducing their physical presence through deportation and restrictive immigration policies that privilege white immigrants from “nice” Western countries.

Past is prologue: America is returning to its “golden age” of whiteness, an era when the achievements of black Americans and other people of color were denied, belittled, or ignored; when they appeared only in subservient roles on television and in film, if they appeared at all; when the academic canon dominated almost exclusively by works of dead white men. It is the America of Pleasantville (1998), stripped of its metaphor of colorization.

Old erasure strategies now harness new technologies. AI is increasingly deployed to erase, distort, and denigrate the black presence (and other marginalized presences) in America. Soon after Trump returned to office, government websites began scrubbing information about black people from their archives. Instead of “86-ing” it, they “404ed” it. In compliance with several presidential executive orders (EO14173, EO14151, EO14185), algorithmic racism is now employed to whitewash history, as federal agencies employ AI to systematically remove material that violates Trump’s anti-DEI directives. When public backlash arises, agencies conveniently blame AI, though the decisions are made by their human operators – the real automatons – “just following the orders.”

Erasure is not confined to the digital realm. As part of his assault on DEI, Trump ended free access to national parks on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, while adding insult to injury by declaring his own birthday a fee-free day. He ordered the National Park Service to remove plaques and interpretive displays recognizing the contributions of black Americans. Yet the truth remains: both enslaved and free black Americans built much of the infrastructure that defines the nation. Black labor built the White House, the Capitol, and other government buildings. The Buffalo Soldiers were instrumental in constructing roads, trails, and facilities that make up the National Park system, even as their contributions were ignored or minimized. Now those contributions are being summarily expunged.

These erasures do not stop at digital spaces or American shores. In the Netherlands, the American Cemetery at Margraten, Limburg, commemorative displays honoring African American soldiers who built the cemetery for U.S. soldiers killed in WWII, specifically those that spotlighted the racism they endured, were removed in March to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI directives. The cemetery contains the graves of 8,301 American soldiers, including 174 black soldiers. Dutch families who faithfully maintained these graves for over 80 years were outraged at the removal of displays dedicated to their “black liberators.” For decades, these displays stood as reminders of their sacrifice – of their “double victory” over fascism abroad and racism at home. That victory is now halved, as a fascistic white America assumes the posture of those it once fought to defeat.

The pathology of historical hagiography demands the concealment of inconvenient truths that contradict the national mythos. According to U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo, panels acknowledging the two-front war fought by black American soldiers “push an agenda criticizing America,” and therefore had to be removed.

Popolo wants to have it both ways. In February, during his first visit to Margraten cemetery, he

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