On March 27, 2025, the Trump White House issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”[*] The document took on a wide range of ideological topics, denouncing some beliefs as wrong and bad… — “divisive, race-centered ideology,” most notably, and proclaiming the virtues and truth of others labeled as “objective facts.” The latter category was said to include “…our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.” These pronunciamentos go on and on, not only in this executive order but in many others. Trump’s ideological campaign by means of executive orders is unprecedented. His claims often deserve refutation and sometimes ridicule.
As scholars who have devoted decades of research to the social construction of race, we object to Trump’s shallow and backward understanding. The President reveals that he is woefully uninformed on the subject of race. To put it kindly, he is way out of his depth. Among all his blunders and gaffes in this executive order, one stands out in particular: his blithe assertion that race is a matter of biology, not of “social construction.” Discussing a work of sculpture at the Smithsonian, Trump’s decree says the art “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” The President criticizes the exhibit for stating that “Race is a human invention.” Indeed, the executive order characterizes both race and gender as largely matters of biology and human nature, and thus fixed and “objective,” not subject to social or political change.
This administration uses a rationale of reverting to biological myths to clean up the messy history of race and racism in the US. Trump and the broader rightwing would like to erase the issue of race from public awareness. Their preferred approach would involve removing the African slave trade as well as slavery itself, along with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, Native American conquest and genocide, and immigration and exclusion (such as the WWII Japanese internment) from museum exhibits, classrooms, libraries, and textbooks alike.
To represent race as a matter of biology, rather than an ongoing historical process, defies both biological and social science. As the specific Smithsonian exhibit criticized by Trump makes clear, and as the entire National Museum of African American History (part of the Smithsonian) makes clear as well, race is indeed a matter of human invention, and thus part of history. Race is indeed socially constructed, its meaning and categories changing over time. Any halfway serious student of the subject must recognize its social instability and changing meaning over time. Trump’s proclamation does not clarify the meaning of race. It obscures it. As the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race puts it,
Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
Why did Trump issue this executive order? Why is this administration so committed to this particular aspect of the culture war? By now there can be little doubt that they want to roll back the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and all its allied anti-racist movements that challenged the nation’s history of white supremacy. It is this legacy of anti-racism, linked to aspirations for equality and social justice, that Trump is attacking. He doesn’t care about a statue in a museum; he cares that white supremacy is under threat. He wants to preserve the economic and political inequality that is built into the fabric of our society. He wants to curtail (or even eliminate) our pluralistic democracy.
In this country, racial politics has always been about democracy. Expanding democracy, as Black movements do, or reducing democracy, as reactionary movements and fascists do. We might say that democracy is about recognizing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. When there is more democracy there is more equality, because previously excluded people, the subaltern classes let us say, get a chance to participate. Oligarchs, white supremacists, white nationalists, homophobes, and toxic masculinists do not like this.
Why is the administration so committed to denying our history? Nationalism and American exceptionalism (Remember Hillary Clinton’s framing of America as “the indispensable nation”) are where we should look for answers. These tropes lead us to forget the violence and predation that characterize the US past. “Who controls the past controls the future. “Who controls the present controls the past,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.
Why is the administration so committed to denying science? (In this case, both biological and social science). Why are people who should know better regressing to debunked 19th century theories of scientific racism, notably eugenics? Not just in the Trump administration, not only among the far right or in the writings of scientific quacks (The Bell Curve for example), but across the entire nation, white supremacism has become a mass movement again. Make America white again!
In some ways our situation echoes that of exactly a century ago. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan staged mass marches at the US capitol, events that bear a strong resemblance to January 6, 2021, or to the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rallies. Like the Klan’s version of a century ago, Trump’s white supremacism of today is powered as much by nativism and anti-immigrant paranoia as it is by anti-Blackness. “The Great Replacement” theory has found supporters across the Western nations with all its attendant evil tropes: “Fortress Europe” (Steve Bannon), “swamping” myths (Margaret Thatcher), and all the other components of the white fear complex. “They are eating the dogs and cats!” Trump proclaimed about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio. While Trump says he wants to fight antisemitism on university campuses, his white supremacist supporters are chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Despite all Trump’s efforts, the Black freedom and civil rights movement lives on. Dr. King’s vision of a racially just America lives on. Movements committed to the fair treatment of immigrants live on. According to polling data, most Americans, even many whites, still retain their belief in racial equality and racial democracy.
But there is, to be sure, a great deal of confusion about what these things mean, and about what race itself means. That is ripe territory for Trump’s abilities to play on people’s fear of the “other.” Pitted against the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the fear-driven racist politics we have seen so many times in the past: against the different, the dissident, the immigrant. The rightwing is resurgent on a global level. Across Europe and the US and even beyond, governments and authoritarians have been attacking these “others,” whom they intend to keep racially subordinate. Our democracy has certainly been damaged but not silenced — at least not yet — by these racist assaults.
In the 21st century, no executive order should be promulgated that contains anti-historic and unscientific claims. Racist myths should not whip up ignorance and hatred. To recognize that race and racism are socially constructed, that they are human inventions and not biological facts, is to understand that they can be changed. Race can be understood as a type of human organizing principle, like religion, gender, class, national identity, even age. Like these other categories, it can be uncertain at its edges. But at its core, race is simply one of our main ways of “making up people,” as Ian Hacking called it, categorizing them. What the Supreme Court once called its “invidious” legacy — notably discrimination and prejudice — could be ended, or at least greatly lessened, in a more democratic and egalitarian society.
Race might thus be reframed as another type of human variation. Racial inequality and injustice might be understood differently too, as limits on social well-being that can be greatly reduced by democratic action. That is what the civil rights movement was about and continues to be about. That is the real meaning of the “social construction of race.”
[*] “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Executive Order by President Donald J. Trump, 90 FR 14563. Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, govinfo, (April 3, 2025); https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-2025-04-03/2025-05838.
Yolanda T. Moses is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. She is a former President of the American Anthropological Association, former Chair of the Board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and former President of the City College of New York (CCNY).
Howard Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate