In Trump’s Ideal Picture of America, Diversity Is Taboo

President Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution this week of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America. He has ordered Confederate statues honoring those who fought to preserve slavery to be restored and celebrated. And he used language carrying uncomfortable racial overtones to describe Washington, a historically Black city, as a hotbed of “savagery, filth and scum” in need of “beautification.”

Over the past seven months, Mr. Trump’s words and actions have revealed what he sees as an ideal picture of the United States, in which the concept of diversity is taboo; the traditional power centers in America — white and wealthy men — get the benefit of the doubt; immigrants are suspect or unwelcome; and people of color must set their grievances and outrage aside.

In the view of his critics, Mr. Trump has used the power of the federal government to promote a vision of America that not only challenges the legitimacy of the Black experience, but also demeans and dehumanizes people of color. In the process, they say, he has elevated and even endorsed a version of American culture that venerates a white-dominated society of old, and casts the history and reality of race in the United States as unwelcome or suspiciously “woke.”

“He’s very much in opposition to a lot of what has happened in terms of race over the last couple of generations,” said Chris Myers Asch, a historian and the author of the book “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in Our Nation’s Capital.”

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Mr. Trump and his aides have spent years developing a political playbook to cast him as a bold leader willing to take dramatic and even unpopular decisions. That playbook now includes branding diversity as a dangerous idea in American life and vilifying people and institutions who speak honestly about history and society, including the truth about slavery.

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In his second term, Mr. Trump has taken a particularly aggressive position on issues of race and diversity, tapping into real tensions about the role that race should play in American society.

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