Please Sage And Fumigate The Blacksonian. MAGA Stayed There

Over the weekend, photos and video footage circulated across social media of Donald Trump’s MAGA hordes taking refuge from a storm inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Yes y’all.  The same “take America back” crowd that has lost its mind over “woke history,” “DEI,” “critical race theory,” slavery being taught in textbooks, and Black folk telling the truth about a history they keep pretending is a national betrayal.

Some folks looked at this scene and said it was a sign that the universe, the ancestors, and maybe even God were showing a sense of humor at America’s 250th party.

Not me.

I didn’t see some delicious historical irony in the sight of all those damp, flag-hatted, and entitled MAGA slumped, sprawled, and lounging in a museum holding all the history they’ve spent years mocking, demonizing, defunding, trying to ban, whitewash, and bury. Nor did I hold a single solitary hope that any of those people would wander through the exhibits, curiously read the placards, learn something, and suddenly develop a John Brown conscience between the cargo holds and the gift shop before emerging ready to destroy white supremacy and redistribute land and wealth.

Please. Some folk can stand inside the truth and still leave with the intellectual humidity of a damp saltine. 

Instead, my imagination went in a whole different direction. In my head, I turned that whole museum scene into a wild, Black-as-hell historical gothic satire with shades of Kara Walker, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Jordan Peele, Zuni fetish dolls, Tales from the Hood, and the Harlem Boys Choir. Yes indeed, I have a twisted mind for Black historical horror, ancestral slapstick, and revenge fantasies when it comes to dealing with racists.

I wanted the whole museum to come alive like a Kara Walker nightmare cut in black paper and ancestral vengeance with human shadows peeling themselves off the exhibits. Or maybe go full Tales from the Hood with a cackling funeral director, his face caked in embalming makeup, locking all the doors and saying, “Welcome to the tour, patriots. We’ve been expecting you.” 

Or Octavia Butler sci-fi with some Kindred portal energy where time itself bent, the walls trembled, and the floorboards started humming like the Harlem Boys Choir singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” on loop, and in an unnecessarily ominous B-flat minor.

I wanted to see some MAGA uncle in a sweaty wet flag tee-shirt turn a corner looking for the restroom and suddenly find himself standing on a plantation in 1812, barefoot, confused, holding a hoe, and sweating through history with no SPF. I wanted him blinking in the sun like, “Is this the 12 Years a Slave immersive experience?” Solomon Northup’s voice would answer, “No, sir. This is the advanced placement module your school board banned.”

I wanted to see some MAGA meemaw stumbling past an attic crawlspace and hear Harriet Jacobs whispering, “Careful now. I had to hide here from Massa for seven years so your people could spend the next two centuries claiming slavery wasn’t that bad.”

I wanted little shadow children with wild plaits and loud beads on them darting through the hallways, laughing loud and eerie as they had wandered out of a Toni Morrison novel. I wanted white women to lean too close to the display cases and get snatched by the spirit of Sojourner Truth and start chanting, “Ain’t I a woman?”

I wanted plantation ghosts sliding across the floor and maroons dropping from the ceiling tiles. I wanted to see Nat Turner leaning over the railings looking down at the crowd like, “Well, well, well.” I wanted Harriet Tubman standing by the elevator with her arms crossed, saying “Going down? Good. Let’s start with the slave ships.” And I wanted to see Frederick Douglass leaning over the balcony, with hair magnificent and unbothered, asking, “To what, to the MAGA, is the Fourth of July?”

And when the storm finally passed, I wanted the news cameras to catch them stumbling back onto the National Mall, shaken, damp, and spiritually disorganized. And I wanted to see every last one of them emerging from that sacred place with a full, permanent 1972 Angela Davis, Soul Train, “say it loud” Afro. Because if Black history was going to shelter them from the storm, shouldn’t they have at least left with a souvenir?  

All jokes aside, I do have a very serious request, though. 

I need somebody to please go down there, like that gaggle of Black women in that famous scene in Beloved, and sage the museum because it has been contaminated by MAGA funk and the sour stink of people who hate Black history. 

Sage the whole damn building.

Sage the lobby. Sage the elevators. The railings. The gift shop. The escalators. The cafeteria. The bathrooms. The benches. The exhibit cases. The windows and air vents. Sage every square inch of floor where those people rested their butts and bones. And don’t forget that little place where people stand around pretending they are not crying after seeing Emmett Till’s casket.

Sage it twice. Three. Four times.  Sage it fifty-eleven times. And then bring in industrial-strength fumigation for whatever ideological mildew they tracked in from the National Mall. To get rid of the stench of white grievance, the sour breath of historical denial, the cheap cologne of performative patriotism, the mothball scent of Confederate nostalgia, the clammy fingerprints, and the spiritual halitosis of white victimhood.

And while they’re at it, somebody needs to do a full damage assessment and inventory check. Make sure there’s been no vandalism or theft.

Be sure to check every display case, every artifact, every sacred object, every corner where somebody lingered a little too long. Because we know white people have a long, grubby, documented history of walking into other folks’ sacred cultural spaces and leaving with “souvenirs.” Make sure Harriet Tubman’s lace shawl is still there. Make sure Nat Turner’s Bible is still there. Emmett Till’s casket. The Greensboro lunch counter stool. The Charleston slave badges. Make sure they didn’t jack Muhammad Ali’s gloves or the tires off Chuck Berry’s Cadillac. I’m just saying, sometimes you gotta count the silver when the “guests” leave.

What’s especially galling about that night at the museum was watching all those white bodies taking shelter in a sacred Black space against the backdrop of their leader continuing to wage war against the Smithsonian itself. 

Let me remind you that Trump’s attack started with his 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order against what he has called “anti-American” and “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” at Smithsonian properties. He put JD Vance in charge of removing material related to race, slavery, American violence, sex, and gender.

Last year, Trump complained that the Smithsonian was “out of control, where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been. Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the museums … and this country cannot be woke, because woke is broke.”

His administration later ordered a review of Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, to make sure they aligned with “patriotic” values ahead of America’s 250th birthday. Currently, the same political process is still moving through the courts, with a federal appeals court temporarily allowing the Trump administration to avoid restoring slavery related materials removed from national parks.

And just days ago, the White House escalated its campaign against the Smithsonian in a new report that brands its leadership as radical and untrustworthy. All this is part of Trump’s broader effort to reshape federal cultural institutions and the teaching of American history back into a whitewashed patriotic costume. 

The real storm was not outside the museum. The real storm is the political project trying to turn museums into propaganda centers, slavery into an unfortunate misunderstanding, Black suffering into “divisive content,” and truth itself into something that needs to be removed before the tourists arrive.

MAGA did not simply shelter inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture. They hid inside the evidence.

SEE ALSO:

Patriot Front Marches Around US Capitol During Freedom 250 Event

Black Church Leaders Promote Membership Of African American History Museum Amid Trump Whitewashing

Please Sage And Fumigate The Blacksonian. MAGA Stayed There was originally published on newsone.com