the attitude with arnie arnesen the friday edition Feb 20
Arnie Arnesen
opening thoughts: Black History Month Is Radical Now A nation that wants to forget its past must be reminded of all of it.
producers: Dave Scott and Stephanie Collins
Chloé LaCasse (the best of the attitude)
streaming live at wnhnfm.org noon EST on the dial-94.7FM Concord NH
podcasts available at
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/attitude-with-arnie-arnesen/id1634055179
In the same city where the Founders wrote the words that have guided the nation for more than two centuries, George Washington—the most esteemed of them—made a home as America’s first president. He brought men and women he had enslaved with him, and rotated them between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon, in Virginia, so that they would not earn their liberty under Pennsylvania law. He shuffled them back and forth so that they would remain his property. These facts cannot be changed; only how they are remembered can.
For 16 years, an exhibit at Washington’s Philadelphia home, “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation”—situated in the shadow of the Liberty Bell’s unambiguous nod to freedom’s ring—highlighted that difficult history. But in late January, a cadre of federal workers yanked placards from the site’s brick walls in response to a March 2025 executive order from the White House that shunned complication. In the order, President Trump had charged the secretary of the interior with ensuring that public monuments “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” ...Trump is correct that the United States is one nation with a shared history—people, places, dates, and events. But that history has been experienced differently by different people. It is a nation of the enslaved and the enslaver. It is also a nation built on principles. And one feels bad about telling the true legacy of the slaveholder only if one identifies, in some way, with his actions rather than his nobler ideals. To recognize the divide between someone’s stated values and their actions is to recognize where they should have done better and where we can still do better.
On Monday, citing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore the placards at Washington’s old home in Philadelphia. History could not be erased. “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees,” Judge Cynthia Rufe, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. “An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it.”
A day later, Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. The civil-rights leader’s two upstart presidential campaigns revealed how limited America’s political imagination was at the time; his platform would become the foundation of the progressive movement for the next three decades. Sometimes I look at black-and-white photos of Jackson—playing basketball with Marvin Gaye, standing next to King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis before he was murdered, or preparing to deliver the first joint address by a Black man to the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction. It’s easy to think of Jackson in the past. But he was also human, and lived until it was no longer this world but his friend John Lewis that he would see in the morning.
In 2019, members of Congress were preparing to discuss H.R. 40, a bill that would study reparations for slavery—a bill to atone for history. I spoke with Jackson ahead of the hearing. We talked about racism, reparations, and ultimately about hope. It felt natural to wonder where someone who had seen so much bad in U.S. history continued to draw his resolve from. Jackson told me that his own hope stemmed from the fact that the truth cannot be erased. “The truth of slavery—that Africans subsidized America’s wealth—that truth will not go away,” he said. History must be remembered. His death is a reminder that the duty to contend with that history falls to those who are still on this Earth.
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D. ARNIE ARNESEN
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Host of "The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen"