ACOM convenes journalists and cultural leaders to address political efforts to erase Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) history
As immigration enforcement actions intensify across the country, and as the Trump Administration pushes to rewrite or erase the nation’s nonwhite history—censoring national museum exhibits, removing plaques from public parks, scrubbing national holidays—ethnic media gathered to hear from speakers about the urgent push to reclaim community narratives.
The American Community Media (ACOM) initiative hosted a virtual ethnic media briefing focused on the growing campaign to suppress BIPOC narratives in the lead-up to the United States’ 250th anniversary.
The event featured Ann Burroughs, President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM); Margaret Huang, Senior Fellow at the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights and former President of the Southern Poverty Law Center; Ray Suarez, veteran journalist and PBS host; and Anneshia Hardy, Founding Executive Director of Alabama Values. Sandy Close of Ethnic Media Services moderated.
Burroughs opened by emphasizing the connection between museum work and ethnic media as parallel efforts in preserving community memory. She stated that ethnic media and museums both face pressure to conform to politicized narratives that downplay America’s history of exclusion and resistance.
She criticized recent efforts by the Trump administration to reframe the nation’s founding through a narrow ideological lens and noted the targeting of museums through threats to funding and curatorial independence. Burroughs called this part of a broader authoritarian trend: shrinking civic space and direct attacks on First Amendment institutions.
Citing JANM’s mission to preserve the memory of Japanese American incarceration, Burroughs described how those historical echoes are resurfacing in the form of surveillance, deportations, and violence against communities of color.
Margaret Huang traced how Confederate memorials, originally erected during Jim Crow, continue to dominate public space. She noted the current administration’s rollback of efforts to rename military bases and remove statues tied to the Confederacy.
Huang pointed to the example of J. Marion Sims—a physician who experimented on enslaved Black women—as a symbol of this legacy. While a statue honoring Sims remains on Alabama statehouse grounds, activist Michelle Browder has built a monument honoring his victims and now funds mobile reproductive care across the state.
Ray Suarez framed the issue as a narrative power struggle. He argued that the government is attempting to rewrite American history to reassert white centrality while sidelining Latino, Black, Asian, Indigenous, and immigrant contributions. He cited recent National Park Service decisions to remove slavery-related content from historical sites as part of this agenda.
Suarez described the term “legacy Americans” as a rhetorical strategy to delegitimize newer immigrant communities and elevate a mythologized white American identity. He warned this narrative regression undermines multiracial democracy.
Anneshia Hardy emphasized that narrative erasure is a deliberate political tactic. She described how states like Alabama restrict historical curriculum and underfund institutions that could document Black history, such as slavery museums. Hardy argued this suppression is structural and designed to push communities of color out of the national political imagination.
Through initiatives like This Is America and the Southern Narrative Project, Alabama Values is working to equip communities with the tools to tell their own histories and resist state-backed erasure.
All speakers agreed: the battle over American memory is a struggle over power. And ethnic media are frontline actors in protecting truth.
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