Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) called out the Trump administration’s efforts to whitewash Black American history on social media Wednesday.
In a video posted to her official account on X, Crockett accused the Trump-aligned right of deliberately obscuring the country’s history of racial injustice.
“It seems like, there are certain people specifically on that side that anytime we want to discuss what has taken place as it relates to Black people and how they took our labor, how they took our lives, how they ruined families, they never want the truth to come out because it hurts their feelings,” she said.
Crockett’s comments were in response to President Donald Trump’s latest criticism of the Smithsonian Institution for, as he put it, focusing too much on “how bad Slavery was.” In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, Trump labeled the Smithsonian “the last remaining segment of WOKE” in America.
The Texas congresswoman argued that some are uncomfortable confronting the realities of racism — and connected this to “these racist maps” currently circulating through the state of Texas.
“They always are upset when you just call them for what they are,” she continued. “But the reality is that we really need to start speaking more truth if we really are going to get to the real power and if we don’t recognize the full history, then we are doomed to repeat it.”
She continued to say that Trump “is a guy that is trying to do everything that he can to repeat it.”
Crockett emphasized that the U.S. is living through what she called a “modern-day civil rights fight,” pointing to historical voting rights efforts led by Texans — including the signing of the Voting Rights Act — as well as the dangers of current attempts to limit voting access.
“The fight in which there was a Texan who signed the Voting Rights Act into law because of these literacy tests and because of Jim Crow,” she stated.
The congresswoman went on to point out Trump’s recent attacks on Americans’ voting rights as they pertain to mail-in ballots. On Tuesday, the Associated Press noted that Trump was “willing to use the vast powers of his office to prevent his party from losing control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.”
She went on to say that there have been multiple instances where racism was used to “delete” the history of Black Americans, and ushered in a rallying cry that this will not be the case.
“Regardless of what [Trump] does, we are going to make sure that we are investing in sharing our history, our true history, our real stories because there have been so many times in this country where they wanted to delete us, where they wanted to kill us. But Black people are survivors. We are the ones that made sure we got through the Underground Railroad. We are the ones that made sure that somehow we went from slavery to the White House,” she said.
She ended with a declaration, “We will tell our stories regardless of what [Trump] does.”