During recent congressional testimony, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Anthea Hartig, faced sharp questioning from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) over internal museum documents that quickly went viral.
Hartig was asked by Gill, “As part of this white supremacy document that your organization has promoted, objectivity is a core and defining aspect of white supremacy culture. Do you think that it’s the goal of the Smithsonian Institution to promote white supremacy culture?” Hartig, seemingly confused, asked Gill more about the document, and Gill responded, “This is part of the ‘MASS Action Toolkit’ that your organization has promoted for several years under your leadership.”
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The controversial materials in question explicitly dismiss the concept of objectivity, claiming that “museum objectivity” is a “fallacy” that “worldviews outside of the dominant culture are hyperaware of,” instructing staff to “assume that everybody has a valid point.”
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While the spectacle of taxpayer-funded institutions abandoning objective truth is alarming, the problem extends far beyond the museums lining the National Mall. This toxic framework has quietly penetrated many of America’s K-12 schools.
Consider a recent House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on parental rights and school content, where Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) challenged San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su. Grothman asked whether the “white supremacy culture” framework was still being promoted in San Francisco classrooms, where it had previously been embedded in teacher trainings. Pushing back on the core premise of the theory, Grothman pointed to the “wild success” of Hmong, Indian, Pakistani, and other minority communities in his own district, arguing that such widespread upward mobility would be logically impossible if American society were inherently rigged for white supremacy. He expressed deep frustration that public school districts are actively rebranding basic life skills, personal responsibility, and standard virtues as instruments of racial oppression.
From New York City to Burlington, Vermont, to Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, where sweeping anti-racist action plans and equity audits have re-engineered staff training, these ideas are routinely thrust upon teachers and administrators as unquestionable doctrine. Even the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, provides teachers with a “White Supremacy Culture Resources” toolkit.
The premise of the “White Supremacy Culture” framework is as radical as it is intellectually bankrupt. First drafted in a 1999 essay by activist Tema Okun and later published alongside Kenneth Jones in “Dismantling Racism,” the framework was never backed by empirical research or scholarly rigor. Okun herself openly acknowledged that the essay was unresearched, written in a single sitting, where the concepts “literally came through me onto the computer.”
Rooted in critical social theory, the framework reduces all of human society into a zero-sum struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. As she puts it, it’s used by the “ruling class elite or the power elite” to “serve capitalism” and “commodify and dehumanize all living things in the name of power and profit.” This phrasing reeks of neo-Marxism.
According to Okun’s framework, traits such as objectivity, timeliness, perfectionism, a sense of urgency, individualism, paternalism, and “worship of the written word” are hallmarks of a white supremacy culture that was built to oppress people of color.
Branding these universal virtues as inherently “white” represents a direct subversion of core American principles. Individualism, the recognition of individual dignity, personal agency, and equal rights, is the bedrock value coded into our nation’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence asserts that fundamental rights are endowed by our Creator to the individual, not distributed to certain racial collectives. Likewise, objectivity reflects a commitment to self-evident, universal truths accessible to all human beings regardless of background.
To claim that minority students or workers are alienated by expectations of written precision, punctuality, or objective truth is not a serious attempt to dismantle racism. It is a patronizing insult that enforces a soft bigotry of low expectations.
Moreover, in practice, labeling organizational rigor as “white supremacy culture” can serve as a shield for raw administrative power grabs. A black veteran schoolteacher in a suburban Chicago elementary school district recounted to me how a new administrative team, arriving from Chicago Public Schools, instructed staff to stop taking internal meeting notes or maintaining formal agendas. The administration rested this decision on moving the school away from “white supremacy culture.” The actual result? Without a paper trail, teachers were stripped of their primary tool for holding administration accountable, leaving them powerless to document procedural violations or push back against political agendas forced into their meetings and, ultimately, the school culture.
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When standard procedures of record-keeping, merit, and objectivity are delegitimized, those in power rule without constraint. Far from liberating marginalized communities, the “White Supremacy Culture” framework creates administrative opacity, disempowers workers, and deprives children of all backgrounds of the very skills required to thrive in a competitive world.
We cannot build a fair and flourishing society by dismantling the habits of mind that enable human achievement and empower self-reliance. Lawmakers and parents are entirely right to challenge the Smithsonian and demand accountability from local schools. Keeping this destructive, anti-American ideology out of our national institutions and public school classrooms is not a mere culture war skirmish — it is an essential defense of truth, individual liberty, free markets, and equal access to opportunity for every child.
Josh Weiner is chief advocacy officer at NAVI