The whitewashing of America

On 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley told the story of the cancellation of the US Marine Band collaboration and concert between talented young musicians and the Marine Band members. The United States Marine Band was founded in 1798. Since that time the band has performed in the White House for everything from parties to inaugurations.

 This year the Marines judged an audition for young musicians to play with the band. The twenty-two winners were excited to take part in a joint concert that was scheduled for spring.

 Donald Trump issued an executive order against all diversity programs, which included the young musicians who were Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Indian. Their music was silenced but they did not go away. An improvised orchestra was pulled together. The concert was played with volunteer retired marine band members playing alongside the young musicians. They performed their program, including a Sousa march, at the music center at Strathmore, near Washington DC.

 Trump has announced that in America, anything related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion be wiped off websites. With this, the whitewashing begins.

 Audacious as it is, the names of Black men and women soldiers have been scrubbed from the records and website of Arlington National Cemetery. You won’t find any information about General Colin Powell or Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall. The story of the Navaho code breakers and brown soldiers who raised the flag for America at Iwo Jima has been deleted.

 The history of slavery in America will no longer be taught. The stories of Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and John Lewis are being erased.

 Stories of brown people – from suspected Venezuelan gang members to outspoken college students here legally were snatched from their work and whisked away to deportation without due process. They were boarded on planes and shipped to prisons in Venezuela and El Salvador.

 X showed detainees in an El Salvadoran prison chained together, heads shaven, bent over like dogs. If instilling fear is part of the goal, ICE is accomplishing this dramatically.

 The stripping of assets of the US Department of Education disproportionately affects minority and low-income students. Grants for school feeding programs and after school care affect marginalized people the most.

 Medicaid, medical care for children and the poorest among us, is at risk.

 Remember the Black Lives Matter movement, following the foot on the throat of George Floyd? The monument in DC erected to commemorate the movement has been dismantled.

 Racists and white supremacists are running America now. Their new hat will read, Make America White Again. But here’s the deal…America was never all white.

 Native Americans lived, hunted and fished the land and the rivers centuries before we were here. Spanish people held territory from Florida to California. White Europeans were latecomers to America.

 White people took the natives’ land. Beginning in 1619 Black people were bought to be slave labor working for white masters. White male hegemony gave white men the false notion that they were in charge of everything.

 Women have been removed from top military positions, along with Black Generals whose only “crime” seems to be race and gender.

 As long as we are looking at who is getting “offed” by this administration, I shudder to think of the gender differenced people who are being dehumanized, humiliated, and targeted for simply existing. Sarah McBride, in the Congress, is a far better person than those who have taunted her and intentionally misidentified her on the floor of the Congress.

 Gender dysphoria is relatively new science. It does not take a genius to look at this and see the struggle some people have coming to terms with their own sexuality, fearing the mocking and dismissiveness of a government that is charged with protecting and defending them. Declaring gender as simply male and female dismisses science and discovery. It makes us sound stupid.

 Shame on us for claiming all this - the whitewashing, offing, deporting and destroying people - will Make America Great Again?

 Racism and misogyny have bubbled among us since our country’s founding. The number of hate groups is up, and people feel license to be cruel, pushy and demeaning. The fish rots from the head down. In America, there is no question that the head is rotten.

 It will take all of us raising our voices to say, enough! This is not the America most of us want. Most of us are immigrants, half of us are women, thirty or forty percent of us are brown or Black.

 The best of America is the struggle to be one people under God. We work for justice and equal treatment under the law. Foundations are being shaken. It’s time for everybody who cares to speak out. Write a congressman. March in protest. Resist the tyranny that is steamrolling over us.

 Let’s leave the whitewashing to Huckleberry Finn.

 Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist and host of the blogsite www.avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com