Jasmine Crockett goes off on her GOP colleagues during hearing she calls a 'white pride rally'

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) didn’t mince words when asking questions of Dr. David Blight at Tuesday’s congressional hearing on the Smithsonian Institution, a hearing she described as a “Republican white pride rally.”

Ahead of Blight’s testimony as part of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency hearing about the Smithsonian, Crockett said, “It might be uncomfortable for some people on this committee to hear about the true history of America, and I hate that for them, but facts are facts.”

She continued, “And it’s a fact that there is a violent, exclusionary, discriminatory, sexist and racist part of American history, where our Indigenous populations were forcibly displaced from their land, where thousands of black people were unjustly lynched, where Black people were denied the right to vote and they still trying to do it today, where women needed their husband’s permission to open a bank account, where people with disabilities were routinely excluded from schools, workplaces and public life, where four little black girls were murdered by the KKK at the 16th Street Baptist Church.”

“And a lot of this wasn’t that long ago,” Crockett added. “In fact, three of those little girls would be 77, and one would be 74. More than 40 members of Congress serving right now would be older than them. Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to desegregate an all-white school, is only 71 years old. More than 100 members of Congress serving right now are older than her.”

With that history in mind, she said, “attacks on the Smithsonian or any other institution that’s willing to tell the true history of America is not only an attempt to rewrite history, but it’s an attempt to erase history.”

Crockett then turned her attention to Blight and asked, “So Dr. Blight, if Republicans are going to ban books, penalize schools and universities, attack museums, if states continue to change curriculum, where do Americans go to learn about the complicated, sometimes racist and violent parts of American history?”

“Thank you for the question. I think they will have to keep going to the same institutions, and we have to keep fighting to preserve what we are doing in those institutions,” Blight answered. In addition to the Smithsonian museums, those institutions also include public schools and libraries, he continued.

“Look, the purpose of history is to enlighten us, inspire us, trouble us, bother us, sometimes make us angry. I find it hard to believe that a young person could go through the Museum of American History and not come out at least inspired with the single most important thing, a sense of the past, a sense of history. Americans have to keep going to those places they trust,” Blight said. “We have to keep those institutions trustworthy.”

This week, Blight published an op-ed in The New York Times that spelled out the importance of Smithsonian Institutes, and the problem with the Trump administration’s focus on dismantling them. “The Trump White House and its history police want us all to live in their chosen bubble, immune from instability or perceived disorder in their take on American greatness,” Blight wrote. “They have a right to their bubble as individual citizens, but to impose it on the rest of us as policy egregiously breaks the public trust.”

Watch the above via PBS NewsHour.

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