The New Yorker observes that American vice-president J.D Vance now sits on the board of the Smithsonian Institution, that country's premier collection of museums, with the assignment to remove "improper ideology" from it and particularly from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” A recent tribute to baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson recently avoided mentioning his skin colour or just what he pioneered that earned the tribute
"Truth" will apparently include mandating the removal of
references to slavery from the African American museum.
In Canada the Museums Act, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board Act,
and similar laws give a broad autonomy to public cultural institutions, such
that the government of Canada does not give direction to its museums "on
cultural matters." But no doubt American legislation gives similar
guarantees to the Smithsonian.
In Toronto groups such as the Canadian Institute for Historical
Education and ABC Toronto fulminate against the "rewriting of
history" every time someone suggests that white males from the 19th
century are not the only ones for whom schools, streets, and public buildings can
be named or statues raised. (ABC hates bike lanes too -- being mostly a local politics pressure group.) And Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre promises in the current election campaign to
"defund woke nonsense" and punish universities that engage in it. So there is that.