{"id":75447,"date":"2025-09-10T13:07:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=75447"},"modified":"2025-09-10T13:07:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:07:22","slug":"president-trump-is-wrong-about-the-smithsonian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=75447","title":{"rendered":"President Trump is Wrong About the Smithsonian"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Edward Kissam<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Image via Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It seems Donald Trump and his platoon of MAGA culture warriors do not like the Statue of Liberty, or at least not the representation of her on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.<\/p>\n

The White House has singled out the\u00a0Immokalee Statue of Liberty<\/a>, honoring farmworkers\u2019 aspirations and dreams of equity, among other works, as being \u201ctoo woke.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 sculpture by\u00a0artist Kat Rodriguez<\/a>\u00a0depicts Lady Liberty with a tomato in her upraised hand in place of a torch, a bucket of tomatoes in the other, the phrase \u201cWe, too, are American\u201d engraved on her pedestal. Commemorating the 2000 march organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida, the sculpture has stood in the museum\u2019s gallery for more than two decades.<\/p>\n

In another time, one might have assumed the statue\u2019s affirmation of farmworkers\u2019 hard work, their perseverance, their optimism, their dreams for a better future, might be celebrated as a reminder of what it takes for the United States to move upward. What is more American than believing in hard work and getting ahead and a better life for one\u2019s children?<\/p>\n

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The Immokalee Statue of Liberty, by artist Kat Rodriguez, commemorates the 2000 march organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida. (Photo: Ed Kissam)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

But now that \u201cMake America Great Again!\u201d and its abbreviated version MAGA have entered the mainstream of American vernacular, the Immokalee Statute of Liberty is, instead, deemed un-American.<\/p>\n

What, specifically, did the MAGA culture warriors see as wrong with the Immokalee Statue of Liberty?<\/p>\n

An August 21 post to the official White House website, \u201cPresident Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian<\/a>\u201d offers some answers. The post is a bullet-pointed screed against \u201cwoke\u201d culture and its supposed influence over the hallowed institution. Alongside complaints about numerous other exhibits in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Latino the memo has the following objection to the Immokalee exhibit.<\/p>\n

An American History Museum\u00a0<\/em>exhibit<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>features<\/em><\/a>\u00a0a depiction of the Statue of Liberty \u201cholding a tomato in her right hand instead of a torch, and a basket of tomatoes in her left hand instead of a tablet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The irony here should not be lost. The Statue of Liberty, an icon of American heritage, is herself a foreign-born dreamer, conceptualized by French activist Edouard de Laboulaye as a gift to the United States to honor and celebrate the abolition of slavery.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, just the point that the Immokalee Statue of Liberty sought to drive home as she accompanied the Coalition of Immokalee Workers on their two-week \u201cMarch for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage,\u201d in the spring of 2000, a march that traversed more than 200 miles from Ft. Myers to Orlando.<\/p>\n

Still more disturbing, as evidence of White House ignorance, mutilation of history, and authoritarian efforts to rewrite history is the fact that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers\u2019 decades-long fight for social justice resulted in the\u00a0Fair Food Program<\/a>, where business and workers work directly with each other to assure decent wages and working conditions. The program is not at an example of \u201cbig government\u201d intrusion into the private sector, rather a model of skillful and collaborative problem-solving.<\/p>\n

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Image via\u00a0Flickr<\/a>. Published under\u00a0CC License 2.0<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Standing there at the Smithsonian, among families and children calmly viewing the work, the lines from Black poet and activist Langston Hughes\u2019 1926 poem, \u201cI, Too\u201d come to mind.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow,<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be at the table<\/em><\/p>\n

When company comes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nobody\u2019ll dare<\/em><\/p>\n

Say to me,<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEat in the kitchen,\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Then.<\/em><\/p>\n

Besides,<\/em><\/p>\n

They\u2019ll see how beautiful I am<\/em><\/p>\n

And be ashamed\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

I, too, am America.<\/em><\/p>\n

Do Trump and his cultural cronies know that many of the Immokalee farmworkers were Haitian, Blacks from a homeland Trump referred to as a \u201cshithole nation\u201d?<\/p>\n

Did they notice, as museumgoers do, that the Immokalee Statue of Liberty has weathered brown skin?<\/p>\n

Did they know that\u00a0CIW collaborated with the Department of Justice<\/a>\u00a0in discovering, documenting, prosecuting, and winning 7 slavery cases where trafficked farmworkers were being held in captivity, and freeing more than 1,500 of them?<\/p>\n

Did they know that the tomato bucket in the Immokalee Statue of Liberty\u2019s hand references CIW\u2019s initial campaign for an additional \u201cpenny a pound\u201d increase in tomato pickers\u2019 wages? Based on piece rate payment of 50 cents per 35 lb. bucket, the campaign yielded a 70% increase in worker earnings.<\/p>\n

Why is this skirmish in ongoing U.S. culture wars worth paying attention to amid the daily whirlwind of headlines? It reminds us that the real and crucial struggle is between narrow efforts to reframe history to please a small minority of narrow-minded voters, and the true mission of government as a collective endeavor to solve problems and actually make progress toward the nominal goal of equity for all.<\/p>\n

Language matters as does cultural perspective\u2014especially in public life and policy.<\/p>\n

Should the 1 million farmworkers who lack legal status be considered \u201ccriminals\u201d and\/or \u201caliens?\u201d Or contributors to American economic well-being and strength? It makes a huge difference in their lives because immigrants branded as \u201ccriminals\u201d can be detained and deported without recourse to due process and families branded as \u201caliens\u201d can more easily be denied health care and education.<\/p>\n

The clash over Smithsonian policy and museum exhibits is, most ominously, evidence of an effort to regiment free expression and distort the day-to-day facts of community life in the real world. The authoritarian end goal is to create a future where all hope of unity and social justice is lost.<\/p>\n

Ed Kissam first got to know Immokalee back in 1979 when he screened his documentary on farmworker pesticide exposure \u201c49 Years in the Land of Plenty\u201d there.\u00a0 He has followed the history of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers since its\u2019 inception and conducted community research there from 1990 through 2010<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByEdward Kissam Sep 10, 2025 Image...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75448,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75447\/revisions\/75448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}