The National Archives’s new racism task force released a report describing the Rotunda—where America’s founding documents reside—as structurally racist and decrying the positive portrayal of the nation’s founders, according to Fox News.
The Archivist’s Task Force on Racism submitted the 105-page report on April 20.
The report self-flagellantly admitted that the National Archives and Records Administration had fallen prey to structural racism, which “unequivocally impacts” the relationship among employees and visitors and their interactions with historical records.
The report’s summary begins with a genuflection to George Floyd, a career criminal and drug abuser, whom the task force canonized as the inspiration for the inquiry into “systems of racial inequality” at the National Archives.
The task force stated that the National Archives perpetuated “structural racism” with “legacy descriptions that use racial slurs and harmful language to describe BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] communities.”
Some other offensive terms include “elderly,” “handicapped” and “illegal alien.”
The National Archives also displayed structural racism because there was a “preponderance of BIPOC in lower-paying, lower-status jobs and the preponderance of White
people in higher-paying, higher-status jobs.”
The Rotunda, which houses the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is racist, too, because it “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding.”
The racism task force also proposed that OurDocuments.gov remove “adulatory and excessive language to document the historical contributions of White, wealthy men,” including former President Thomas Jefferson.
The report’s authors echoed Antifa and Black Lives Matter in calling for the Rotunda to be “reimagined” with a “more inclusive and historically accurate tribute to the nation’s founding” that showed “the contributions of women, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved peoples.”
The task force suggested that the Rotunda should incorporate “dance or performance art in the space that invites dialogue about the ways that the United States has mythologized the founding era.”
The group calls for the National Archives to add “safe spaces,” where visitors can step aside to lament America’s structurally racist history.
Some content may need to come with “trigger warnings” so that sensitive employees and guests can refrain from interacting with it.
However, the report itself may soon be deemed structurally racist after academics at Brandeis University declared that the phrase “trigger warning” invoked psychologically harmful imagery of firearms.
