EMILY KWONG, HOST:
From painting over Washington D.C.'s Black Lives Matter mural to temporarily scrubbing the stories of Navajo Code Talkers in World War II from federal websites, scholars and activists say stories of nonwhite history, even recent history, are being erased at rapid speed. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports.
SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: Keyonna Jones says it hurt seeing the jackhammers dig up the yellow concrete that she had painted with the words Black Lives Matter.
KEYONNA JONES: When you're down there literally hearing and feeling the street being torn up, seeing, like, literally the paint being pushed to the side...
DIRKS: Five years ago, after the police killing of George Floyd, Jones was one of the artists who came out to paint in the middle of the night. She says watching the mural's removal felt like watching an attempt to erase the racial justice movement that arose out of grief over Floyd's killing.
JONES: It was surreal, if nothing else.
DIRKS: Jones says there's always been this kind of erasure, but now it's supercharged. The Department of Defense, for example, has been scrubbing websites for images and articles they equate with diversity, equity and inclusion. A page about the military career of baseball great Jackie Robinson was erased and then restored after pushback, as a few others have been. Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, says many pages and pictures, like on Arlington National Cemetery's website, are just gone. He says the Pentagon tells the larger story of defending America through individual tales of heroism.
DON MOYNIHAN: If you take away pictures of women, if you take away pictures of Black heroes, of Asians, of Native Americans, of Latinos, then who's left?
DIRKS: It sends a message that only white men belong, he says. Moynihan points to the erasing of articles about the Navajo Code Talkers, who used their native language to create an unbreakable code in World War II. The DOD has restored those pages, but Zonnie Gorman, whose father was a Code Talker, says even the temporary erasure feels scary.
ZONNIE GORMAN: I mean, I'm still kind of in a state of shock.
DIRKS: Gorman says Native Americans have a long history of being erased. When her father and the other Code Talkers were kids, they were sent to federal boarding schools.
GORMAN: Where they were systematically attempting to destroy our language and our culture. And the irony - right? - that that same government would turn around during World War II and say, hey, gee, well, you know, can you use your language and help us win this war?
DIRKS: She says the Code Talkers' story is proof that diversity makes us stronger. But that contradicts the message coming from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host. Here he is in February, talking to Pentagon staff.
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PETE HEGSETH: I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength. I think our strength is our unity.
DIRKS: Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale, whose most recent book is titled "Erasing History," says it isn't unifying to ban these histories. He says recent history is also being erased. He, too, points to the Black Lives Matter mural. It's not just about getting rid of a painting, he says, but an attempt to paint over evidence of a movement that brought people across the world out onto the streets.
JASON STANLEY: We supposedly all coalesced as a country around finally trying to address structural racism, and there are symbols representing this kind of agreement.
DIRKS: Erase the symbols, break the agreement, he says. Jeanelle Austin is the lead caretaker of George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, a place that became a spontaneous memorial for Floyd. She says her community built the space on its own, with no federal funds, for a reason.
JEANELLE AUSTIN: We need to be able to tell the story as it happened because, again, racism exists to misremember and disremember story.
DIRKS: Which is why, she says, historically marginalized communities have always found ways to tell their own stories in the face of erasure. Sandhya Dirks, NPR News.
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