AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

The National Park Service Monday appeared to have restored its original webpage on the history of the Underground Railroad, following a backlash over its deletion of a prominent image of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, as well as edits to the text that minimized the horrors of slavery, instead talking about white-Black cooperation. A Washington Post investigation published Sunday found, in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration, Tubman’s photograph had been removed and replaced with images of Postal Service stamps that highlighted this Black-white cooperation.

Late last month, President Trump issued an executive ordered titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which claims the Smithsonian’s museums have come under, quote, “the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” unquote. The order singles out the National Museum of African American History and Culture, inaugurated by President Obama in 2016. On Friday, Kevin Young, the director of the museum since 2021, resigned.

Our next guest argues nothing about these efforts to whitewash American history nor the Trump administration’s expanding crackdown on dissent and immigration should be surprising to Americans. Fordham University professor Christina Greer’s latest op-ed for The New York Times is headlined “Black Americans Are Not Surprised.” She writes, quote, “It is frightening and disappointing but not surprising if one knows anything about the Black experience in America,” unquote.

Christina Greer, thank you so much for being with us. You wrote the book How to Build a Democracy: From Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan to Stacey Abrams, as well as the book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream. Welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from the title, from there, “Black Americans Are Not Surprised”?

CHRISTINA GREER: Thanks, Amy.

Well, you know, there’s just been so much handwringing about “How could this be happening? What’s going on? This isn’t the country I know.” And so many Black Americans are like, “This is absolutely the country we know.” This is a country that’s made a lot of progress over the decades, the centuries, but there’s always progress and regress in this nation.

And so, if we think about post-Civil War Reconstruction and the great progress that we made, when we had elected officials, Black elected officials, even in the South, and then that was a very short-lived experiment, and we had decades of brutality in Jim Crow, military — Black military officers being lynched in their uniforms, you know, redlining, the refusal to include Black women in many of the New Deal policies, therefore the lack of generational wealth that was able to be passed down, because of Black domestic workers, you know, people being fired. You know, we always joke — Good Times, the TV show, the Norman Lear TV show with John Amos, whose famous tagline is, you know, “Florida was last hired and first fired.” These are all things that Black Americans are fully aware of. Nothing that’s happening right now is a shock. It’s just a shock to so many white people because it’s never happened to them.

But what we’re seeing, sadly, happen in the 21st century, so many of our parents and grandparents have told us these stories. My parents, who are very young and hip, and we travel together, they went to segregated schools. My father integrated his high school in Miami. My mother never went to integrated schools a day in her life. You know, and these are people who are still walking among us. Ruby Bridges isn’t even 70 years old. So, so many have no idea who Ruby Bridges even is — right? — the little Black girl who integrated Louisiana public schools. And there’s been a systemic erasure of Black history consistently, book bannings consistently.

So, as I write in the piece, you know, we kind of jump from slavery and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to, all of a sudden, civil rights. We jump over a hundred years to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. And then, all of a sudden, we jump a few more decades to a post-racial Barack Obama. But there is a really, really brutal and bloody and dark history of Black people in this country at the hands of white people — not all white people, but at the hands of enough white people, to push us into a really hard conversation that we’ve refused to have as a nation. And because of that, so many people are handwringing and head-scratching at this particular moment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Greer, I wanted to ask you about the Trump administration’s not only attacks on higher education over issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, but now the U.S. Department of Education is requiring all public school systems, within a few days, to certify that they’ve done away with what the administration calls discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Your response?

CHRISTINA GREER: How is it discriminatory to know one’s history? I mean, we can’t move forward as a nation collectively — and that’s what all of my books are about, really trying to figure out how do we move forward — if we don’t understand our collective past.

You know, white people and Black people are inextricably linked in this country, not just our last names and our families, but the brutality that so many people experienced on this land. It’s our shared history. Black history is American history. And to not understand it is to not fully understand this country. It’s to not understand why LBJ was such a great president and helped push forward the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration Act, and the complexities of how he did that as a white Southerner. To not understand this country is to not understand Eisenhower integrating the armed forces by executive order and how we’ve used executive orders in the past for some really amazing things — the Emancipation Proclamation, integrating the armed forces — and for some really horrific things — i.e. Japanese internment camps. They put in Italians and Germans, as well.

So, to not understand our shared history is to sort of meet the moment and not know where we’re going. And I think that’s part of the frustration that so many Americans have right now. I think that’s part of the confusion that is deliberate right now.

We have to have — you know, children can understand complex issues. I think anyone who’s been around kids long enough, if you present them with information in a way that is palatable, they get it. And it’s not divisive to understand how there was U.S. chattel slavery in this country. It’s not divisive to understand how we once had thousands of different Native American tribes across the nation. You know, I live in New York state. We had a robust Native American community that is no longer in many parts of the state.

And so, it’s our shared, collective identity that can help us be a great nation. And, you know, if we want to just get to brass tacks, being a diverse nation helps you make money. That’s a language that some people understand, right? When you have diversity, when you have equity, when you have inclusion, it’s actually better for your bottom line. So, I think Target is finding out how diversity, equity and inclusion is better for their bottom line. I think a lot of businesses will slowly realize. You know, if you don’t understand the bus boycotts of Montgomery from the 1950s and ’60s, you know, and the boycotts in various lunch counters across the South — those were economic boycotts that had, obviously, other consequences. But, you know, to get racial equity, there was an economic component to so much of what brave Black Americans did in the South. And I think a lot of corporations are going to find out, in the 21st-century version of what those economic boycotts can look like, to move forward a more equitable agenda.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you, as well, about the — you mentioned the Trump administration’s targeting of especially dissident students and foreign students. For example, you are a Tufts graduate. Your response to a Tufts student, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was sent to Louisiana after being driven to Vermont, but was picked up by immigration agents in Somerville, Massachusetts, the video that captured her arrest and detention? Your sense of what is — how universities should respond to these direct incursions of the government into their student bodies and on their campuses to seize students?

CHRISTINA GREER: Well, you know, as a university professor, the university is a space for intellectual ideas and debates. We cannot have a space where it’s filled with fear and silence. And so, to see that horrific video is frightening.

I think universities have to band together. This is the — what is the point of an endowment if during hard times you’re not going to use it? We know that there are some universities that are larger, more powerful than others. If they stick together — collective action, which is what I talk about in all of my books — you can actually get a lot more than sort of being picked off one by one. We do know, I mean, this is again, time and time in America, if you know your history. You know, as you target one group, many groups don’t ever think that they’ll be targeted. And it’s like your day will come.

So, if you do not come together and think of a strategy — I mean, as an intellectual space, we debate these ideas. This is what has made this nation actually move forward as one of the leaders in the world, for better or for worse. And so, this idea that immigrants take away from the robust intellectual space is patently false, first of all, but it’s creating a level of fear where, you know, what is the point of a university if we have homogeneity of thought and silence?

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to — 

CHRISTINA GREER: It makes no sense.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but, of course, we’ll continue to follow this issue. Eight more international students have had their visas revoked. A hundred fifty have been revoked in the last few weeks. Fordham professor Christina Greer, we’ll link to your New York Times op-ed, “Black Americans Are Not Surprised.”

That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, Juan González in Chicago. Thank you so much for joining us.