McWhorter: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn

Good commentary:

…The proper response to that very real problem, however, is, as President Bill Clinton put it about affirmative action, to “mend it, but don’t end it.”

Mr. Trump’s approach is instead a bleat of tribalist pique, seeking to simply deep-six any discussion of race (or gender or sexuality, or a great many other uncomfortable topics). His executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” is a clapback to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that frames any outreach efforts to Black people as by definition a form of discrimination against white people.

A mature, multiethnic society should resist the complacency of birds-of-a-feather hirings and admissions, instead seeking out talent wherever it might reside and whatever it might look like. To be sure, that mission was sullied by identity politics, the temptations of virtue signaling, the opportunity to follow the funding trail and ultimately a tacit commitment to lowering standards. Mend that. Don’t try to force the country back to an earlier, more willfully oblivious era, when the topic of inequality was everywhere to be witnessed but nowhere to be mentioned. That is a kind of barbarity.

So is the idea is that any teachings about Black history are a form of political agitation, “radical and wasteful,” as another executive order on D.E.I. has it. That our country openly addresses Black history in all of its facets is a badge of honor and sophistication, and the institution that Mr. Trump called out as harming our view of American history is an exemplar of all the field could be. The president and his minions should just walk on by. The rest of us should walk on in.

Source: The Future of Black History Lives on Donald Trump’s Front Lawn