Black bishop and author Earl Walker Jackson, a descendant of enslaved ancestors, is criticizing the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for what he said amounts to anti-American “indoctrination” against the “greatest nation on earth.”
Although his great-grandparents were enslaved, Jackson believes that “if you were born an American, you hit the proverbial lottery because you have more opportunity and hope than any people living anywhere else on the planet.”
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Jackson said the latest controversy over what the White House described as the Smithsonians woke “ideological capture” angered him because of what he views as smears against the U.S.
“It makes me angry when people do this to our country, but it’s sad too because what it tells me is that the indoctrination machine is hard at work convincing people [of] this narrative,” he said. “This is a wonderful country; it’s the greatest nation on earth. And you’ve got people so indoctrinated into seeing our country sliced and diced into race and ethnicity and class and income and so forth that they fail to understand the blessing of the .”
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The Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) has faced scrutiny over what the White House described as the museums promotion of woke ideology. In July, the White House Domestic Policy Council released its 162-page “Saving America’s Story” report, concluding that the NMAH has undergone “ideological capture.” The report included images of exhibits and placards and information about museum curators and leaders.
After the report was released, congressional hearings brought additional scrutiny to NMAH leadership. NMAH Director Anthea Hartig, who has led the museum since 2019, drew particular attention. A resurfaced video of a presentation by Hartig shows her calling “history as a practice” a “prime .”
In a presentation to University of California, Los Angeles, students in February 2025, Hartig asserted that the “United States long and violent racial history continues to be present in our reckoning, if you will” and said that “redress in the form of reparation, of course, goes beyond acknowledgement of wrongdoing; it should leverage responsibility, it should think about the act of correction, as we pursue restorative justice and, for us [on the call], restorative justice through history.”
In response, Jackson said, “She talks about how history should be a tool of social justice. No, history should be facts about what has happened in the past and leave others to draw their own conclusions about what those facts mean.”
“But no, she wants to use history to try to get people to think a certain way and respond a certain way and, namely, to be somewhat angry and bitter and resentful of our country because of our past,” he continued.
Though the was released less than a month ago, Jackson said he has been warning for years about what he describes as woke ideology at the Smithsonian.
In 2015, he confronted the Smithsonians
