The administration’s attacks on the Smithsonian Museum for being too “woke” in its exhibits are part of a broader effort to control America’s story. But, for example, Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, has created institutions that confront the nation’s painful past to preserve an honest vision of history.

Everyone has been trying to figure out what the Trump years mean for America, in particular about civil rights and the criminal justice system.

The world has changed since Jan. 20. In this country we’re in the midst of a critically important narrative struggle about who we are, what our priorities are as a nation and how we get to a better future. Our courts and the larger society are retreating from that commitment to full equality and justice.

History is becoming a real battlefield. In August, the White House announced a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions and collections. What’s going on here? Why is history so important?

When we are honest about history, we learn things, we discover things and we prepare for things differently. In Johannesburg, for example, the apartheid museum is so honest about the legacy of something so devastating.

In Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing a monument or a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. There's this reckoning with history. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

This liberated them, empowered them to create a new democracy that is trusted, respected, vibrant and that’s growing. It doesn’t mean that all the problems have been eliminated, but it does mean that they have recovered something really important, discovered something important.

Slavery, liberation and segregation needs to allow us to liberate us from the burden that that history creates — that burden that still hangs over us, the fog that that history has created that no one is trying to address.

America should celebrate its history. There are lots of things about America that are worth celebrating, but it should also acknowledge the mistakes it’s made. The mistake with trying to whitewash history is that we just continue and sustain the problems that that history has created.

We need to create a world where the children of our children are no longer burdened by this history of racial bias, where there are no more presumptions of dangerousness and guilt that get assigned to people based on their color, where everyone is free to live kind of a life of value and opportunity without restraint because of their color. And we won’t get there if we don’t address some of these harms.

For decades in this country, we had really qualified women and really qualified people of color being denied opportunities for leadership because they were women, because they were Black, because they were brown. That was unfair. It was wrong.

Also, now courts tolerate more racial bias in cases, more extreme misconduct by police and prosecutors, and they look for procedural reasons not to address substantive constitutional violations. That proceduralism became a fence to keep the courts from having to talk about really hard issues.

We are living where the rule of law is not operating in a way to protect people who have been historically vulnerable, historically victimized by power and abuse, and are, in fact, being utilized in a way that will add to that abuse, add to that exclusion.

Judges in state courts who refuse to enforce federal law are no longer fearful that a federal court will overturn them. They’re not worried that the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene.

The composition of the court right now makes it an institution that if you’re trying to advance racial justice, if you’re trying to advance human rights. It is not a very welcoming or hospitable place.

If a court says that states can do whatever they want to do to maintain political power, to disenfranchise Black and brown people, then that will take us back decades. It will fundamentally negate all of that progress.

Should the Court have the authority to undermine the objectives of the president? And that will be a fundamental question this court has to decide — one that will shape the future of this country.

Truth has the power to be resurrected, even in the face of lies and difficult dark days it can triumph!

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