America is turning 250 in a few months and the Trump administration is taking its citizens down memory lane. 

Kidnapping and killing citizens and immigrants, converting warehouses to concentration camps, rolling back women’s rights, suppressing votes, and reengraving the hierarchies of race and gender, executive actions all taken to get the country back to its beginning, which is only privileging males who are socially colored white. The past few years have been a review for some Americans, but for others, it has been perhaps a difficult history lesson. 

White-body supremacy historically and contemporarily relies on the deliberate manipulation of memory—a process described as “historical amnesia” or “organized forgetting”—to maintain structural power and systemic advantages. In America’s case, this phenomenon involves erasing or sanitizing the violent realities of chattel slavery, colonialism, and racialized oppression, treating them as tangential rather than central to the nation’s development. 

“Organized forgetting” is not accidental but a deliberate, repetitive omission of narratives that challenge the myth of American exceptionalism. This kind of ignorance is manufactured. These examples include the “Lost Cause,” which romanticized the Confederacy and timestamped a historical root of white-body supremacy.

See it in the erasure of African American history by removing plaques detailing the lives of nine African Americans who were enslaved by George Washington: Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll and Joe, which gives the hashtag “Say Their Names” new meaning. 

The action is part of a broader, controversial effort by the Trump administration to scrub, also known as whitewashing, national park sites of signs perceived to present a negative view of American history, targeting materials regarding chattel slavery, the treatment of Indigenous Americans, LGBTQ+ issues, civil rights, and even climate change. The executive order signed last March is called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The National Park Service (NPS) has been directed to remove or alter exhibits due to “historical revision” that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” 

This is weaponized projection and white lash against two hundred years of social progress, both strategies used to reshape the American social order. The aim remains to restore the lost status of the “white” male American.

Because the country should be ashamed of its past and this present rollback on the progress made toward a more free, equitable, and just society. Initiated by the founders as a democratic experiment and an alternative to monarchy, which included chattel slavery, civil war, and apartheid, European Americans, racialized as white, overwhelmingly voted for authoritarianism and a white Christian nationalist agenda. 

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Darren Beattie posted on X, formerly Twitter, in October 2024. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men.” The former Trump speechwriter was tapped for a senior State Department role in early 2025 to represent American values abroad. 

Two of those three adjectives are at play and look at the state of the country, which has long been propagandized as “a shining city on a hill,” which depends on the American city and where you are positioned in it. Because it was never about competency, “reverse racism,” civil rights legislation, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

It is not that America cannot get its story straight. Instead, the manufactured majority is choosing to live in a state of delusion, where they are forcibly viewed as supreme.

See the January 6th insurrection as an ongoing struggle with a manufactured “white” nation, enforced by media, education, and immigration policies. It is a fight for a continued false sense of security that can only be described as white privilege, where everyone can only sing your praises.

“It’s (your) party and you can cry (and play victim) if (you) want to.” But ahead of this milestone, I will be telling the truth as your resident party pooper, raising a toast to America, the country known as Turtle Island for 15,000 years by the Indigenous people, as a big white lie. Hold the confetti.

Editor’s Note: I write a weekly op-ed for Good Faith Media, which first appeared here.