The Museum Grappling With the Future of Black America

“It is an act of patriotism to understand where we’ve been.”

So said President Barack Obama during his speech at the opening ceremony of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which celebrated its one-year anniversary on September 24. “This,” Obama had continued, “is the place to understand how protest and love of country don’t merely coexist, but inform each other.” His words feel eerily prescient given the national news of the past week—a week that coincidentally marked the 60th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s first day at an all-white high school—and, more broadly, the past year.

Since the election of Donald Trump, conversations about the history of race and the NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem, calling them “sons of bitches,” and suggesting the league fire them for being unpatriotic. “The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,” Trump Monday, despite the fact that the former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling last year to protest police brutality against unarmed black and brown Americans. It would seem that dissent and love of country are incompatible to Trump, contrary to Obama’s words. At the same time, Trump’s definition of patriotism isn’t informed by the understanding that to be black in America is to have hope for the future despite generations of disenfranchisement and racist terror.