Trump Is Tearing Down History
The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.
The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.
Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.
[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]
“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.
I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.
The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:
What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.
Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”
On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.
“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”
“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.
Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.
While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.
I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]
Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”
Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.
Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.