How Our History Became “Divisive”

Mark Harris

Weeks before losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the tactic that has defined his second term. It took the form of an executive order banning federal workplace diversity training; the tone was grave, the legalese pulsing with indignation. Public servants, contractors, and military personnel, Executive Order 13950 alleged, were being taught hate, and “divisive concepts” promoted by a “malign ideology” threatened to resurrect ideas “soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War.” This neo-Confederate enemy, as it turned out, was almost any mention of racism, and specifically critical race theory (CRT), an academic framework that studies how racism shapes law, health care, and education.

Joe Biden’s administration rescinded the order. But during his presidency, the right continued to obsess over CRT and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), contorting them into a raging kaiju. Red-state lawmakers piled on gleefully, introducing hundreds of bills, resolutions, and policies circumscribing how racism and inequality are addressed in public forums ranging from K–12 schools and universities to state health departments. “Critical Race Theory is divisive and undermines the cohesion of our troops,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted in 2021. Such “divisive concepts,” declared a 2022 Tennessee law barring diversity training at public universities, “exacerbate and inflame divisions.”

This eager embrace of the word “divisive” is another legacy of Executive Order 13950, which Trump restored immediately upon returning to office. Typically a humdrum means of deeming something controversial, the term has in recent years become a political blow dart. Seemingly innocuous, yet poison-tipped, it appears in condemnations of people and institutions that dare acknowledge the existence of discrimination and bias, subtly granting the accuser moral authority under the guise of meritocracy. The phrase depicts regressive cultural change as a commonsense return to sanity: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” asserted a March executive order directing Smithsonian exhibits to be less “negative.”

Such declarations treat national unity as a sacred object and division as sacrilege. Race, the thinking goes, has no place in Americans’ idyllic “shared history” because it breeds obsession and discord, preventing us from getting along. Why race holds such subversive power, and why it divides us, is never broached, of course, because that context and history (genocide, pillage, slavery, segregation, mass incarceration) might, if accurately recounted, be “divisive.”

Yet racial ideology perfuses the screeds against divisiveness, jeremiads that often universalize white angst. “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs,” a parent wrote in a 2021 open letter opposing anti-racism initiatives at his daughter’s private school. “If [the school] really cared about ‘inclusiveness,’” he wrote, it would abandon “the extraordinarily divisive idea that there are only, and always, two groups in this country: victims and oppressors.”

There is a low bar to declaring something divisive. The charge demands no burden of proof and lacks the force and risk of a label such as “racist.” All that’s required is a tittle of discomfort—a standard that benefits those with the most to lose if systemic racism were dismantled. Hence the indelibly hollow and affective language of statements rebuking divisiveness. Consider South Dakota’s law, echoing Trump’s 2020 order, that purports to “protect students and employees at institutions of higher education from divisive concepts” that might cause anybody “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”

The law reads like a civil rights statute but its protections are fluff. It gets around First Amendment concerns the same way the word “divisive” is often used in arguments: by policing the imposition of feelings rather than speech. Despite their grandstanding denunciations of racial superiority, these laws and proclamations sneakily safeguard white American exceptionalism—the “white” being silent.

That plausible deniability is the draw of weaponizing “divisive.” Users of the word can feel they’re defending America rather than whiteness. The anti-anti-racists frequently present their crackdowns as a fix for corrupted institutions: Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI in the military and the Smithsonian are titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Similarly, when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued his own executive order denouncing “inherently divisive concepts,” he made sure to also pitch a rose-tinted version of history. In his flattering timeline, we have progressed “from the horrors of American slavery and segregation, and our country’s treatment of Native Americans, to the triumph of America’s Greatest Generation against the Nazi Empire, the heroic efforts of Americans in the Civil Rights Movement, and our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism.” There’s no debate, dissent, or actors in this narrative—just a phantasmal national spirit and its increasingly glorious works.

This vibes-based history makes putty of truth while claiming to protect it. “Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them,” wrote the authors of the 1776 Commission, a group of historians and panjandrums Trump convened to “recollect the great legacy of the American national experience.”

Again, division was invoked as a vague, treasonous plot against the truth of our greatness and unity. “American,” in the commission’s framework, isn’t an identity for people to define through the lens of their own experiences and heritage. Rather, it is the only valid identity—an orthodoxy the right aims to enforce with the full might of the federal government. Under this rigid order, there’s no room to interrogate our rocky history, let alone change it for the better. There’s just one nation, under God, indivisible—now, always, and forever.