Trump's About to Force A Historical Reckoning

How we take on MAGA and win, right where we are

OKC Land Run Monument

At a bus stop in Prague as I stepped out onto the street, I looked up and saw six gauntly, fractured figures of men standing on steps before me, drawing me in to look closer. In a moment of happenstance and curiosity, I was transported to one of grave remembrance as I read about the people whose lives had been transformed and ended by communism in Prague. And then I walked on, thoughtful and a little changed.

Our everyday landscapes shape us. To various degrees, they may tell us about where we are, instill a sense of security, and send messages about how we are part of our community.

In Danville, Virginia, I tried to ignore looming Confederate flags as I drove along main thoroughfares. Walking downtown, I read plaques about how a building served as a prison where numerous Union soldiers perished during the Civil War. I looked up the steps of City Hall at a statue of a notably racist mayor who backed the Confederacy. And I saw a bench marker explaining the city’s role as the “last capitol of the Confederacy,” which, taken with everything else, seemingly boasted the distinction.

Landscapes can be an avenue to teach history and culture, establish group norms, and heal past harms. In their reflection, they may reinforce old narratives and tacitly approve of discriminatory history telling. Conversely, they may move us to see the world in a new way and inspire us to change our actions in a way that better aligns with that vision.

In Budapest, empty bronze shoes are lined up along the Danube next to a promenade where a passerby might swallow a lump in their throat as they reflect on the Holocaust victims who once filled them. Giant concrete blocks, thoughtful statues, a symbolic greenway trail, and memorialized city-center buildings may instill a similar response for those in Berlin. There are brass name plates installed outside homes all across Europe called “stolpersteine,” or stumbling stones, meant to remind people of the community members who were lost during Nazi rule.

Again in contrast, on the touristy canal and downtown parks in Oklahoma City, stands a larger than life bronze depiction of settlers on horses and in wagons charging across the plain in an action-packed snapshot of the 1889 Land Run. Signage for the nearby University of Oklahoma Sooners, who take their name from settlers who invaded and stole native territory with force, is an unavoidably common sight around the city. There’s a whole 89er historical marker trail that details and glorifies the process of settling Oklahoma land and establishing towns.

Though imperfect and always incomplete, Europe’s reconciliation of historical harm done is apparent. The never-again sentiment is palpable and contagious, and you’d have to be a special kind of cold-hearted not to acknowledge the senseless generational pain and suffering of the people living there.

But in America, where colonialism, slavery, and the Civil War ravaged our country for decades, we largely accept ignorance of past harm done and deny our collective responsibility to heal it. Rather than spurn the racists who committed genocide and unspeakable assaults on human life and dignity, we allow them to stand in places of honor. We send messages that whatever atrocity was done in our past, it was done with the best of intentions and worked out for the better of the country. Or we excuse it as part of a different time, complicated context, or people who didn’t know better.

As a nation, we take a hit and carry on, take a hit and carry on, take a hit and carry on. Each time getting weaker, because instead of allowing ourselves to heal, we refuse the care that would make us better. We walk on broken legs and shake hands with fractured fingers, professing to be better than ever. We’re hobbling along and deepening our pain, when we could be purposely rehabilitating and proactively getting stronger.

And now, with the reelection of Donald Trump, rampant racism and corruption has reopened our haphazardly formed scars and exacerbated wounds. They are undeniably visible and acutely hurtful. If you didn’t feel the pain in policy and policing, Trump is making sure you take it in when you encounter federal lands and properties, re-renaming them after problematic historical figures.

There’s no missing the intent behind these moves. Their insistence that we revere those who have caused such profound injury to our country, is tactical. MAGA wants the pain of our past to continue. They feed off of it.

For MAGA, it would be a devastating blow to acknowledge that Confederates from the Civil War Era were traitors to the country, and that they committed horrific acts that can never be forgiven. For those relying on Southern pride, feeling shame as part of their heritage is an existential threat. A part of their identity must die for that to happen.

And because our country has not definitively spoken on the rightness and wrongness of definitively horrific parts of our history, and because we have plenty of messages in our environment saying there is validity in the actions of our country’s traitors and torturers, there is still a debate to be had.

When loyalists defend Trump, they are fighting for a historical reality in which they know who they are—the good guys. But right now with historical harm reemerging as devastatingly clear real-time cruelty, it is increasingly difficult to do so.

Now is the perfect, or at least perfectly messy, time to face our crippling history, because we are forced to look at it. Our injuries have to be remedied, and this time, we have to mend them well, not allowing the justification of racism to infect our wounds. We have to make a habit of healing the right way— by shutting down any pride in shameful parts of our past.

And we need to do it together.

Our public spaces are an incredibly underused avenue to communicate. They have the power to bring us together, to work through collective trauma, and to see ourselves with more humility and complexity. They can stealthily push us into meaningful conversations with new understanding from divergent perspectives. They can imbue lesser told histories into the public realm and stretch our ability to empathize with people from different places and experiences.

As we challenge the people and political structures that are currently doing harm, we must also confront the environments around us that support them. All those little details we’ve taught ourselves to ignore or that we didn’t think we could challenge. They can all make a difference. All the racist relics must fall.

Right now, make a point to pay special attention to the messages present in the landscapes that surround you. Question the symbolism of what you see, and find out more about how those objects and messages are present. Think about what you would like to see, and, for just today, use all of it to inspire you to leave your own mark on the world.

With love and hope for the future,

Stephanie

What messages are embedded in your environment? What, if any, effective forms of collective, historical reconciliation have you seen? What would you like to see where you live?