In early August, the White House invited a group of historians to talk about threats to American democracy. But all of those experts were white — and it shows, critics say.
President Joe Biden argued that Donald Trump's supporters pose a threat to U.S. democracy during an address billed as the"battle for the soul of the nation" at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia on Thursday.
But it wasn't only the lack of diversity in that group, it was where that lack of diversity seemed to lead. "We've had the death of democracy happen right here, in the United States," says Mack."African Americans experienced this directly." He's talking especially about the overthrow of Reconstruction, and all that followed, well up until the Civil Rights Movement.
"At the turn of the century we lost everything," says University of Connecticut Professor Manisha Sinha. ."If we were living in 1940," he said to Capeheart, who it's important to note, is a Black man,"you and I would've said there's a serious danger that America will not be a democracy."Beschloss went on, saying,"There are people from within who wanna make this an authoritarian system."
"The key to all of this is when the basic institutions of the country are being called into — the legitimacy of those institutions is being called into serious question," he told CNN's Michael Smerconish. "Here we have this crisis which is shot through with racial elements and that's the person in the room," Cobb says."Yeah. That's a problem."Scott Kurashige, executive director of the American Studies Association, says to really understand the past, and its role in the present, we must look to historians who study more than just those in power. There is value to the presidential historian who reads every scrap of paper a president wrote, he says.
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