On March 27th, 2025, the White House released a statement regarding an executive order that declares a desire to bring back colonial America’s mythology to federal institutions. The statement alleges that there exists a “concerted effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” with a “distorted narrative.” But history is constantly being disrupted and reinterpreted as new evidence emerges. This is not “revisionism” but critical scholarship—something that should be encouraged in any functioning democracy. There is also an anti-poor and racialized dimension concerning the perspective by which a history is being told. The perpetrators or benefactors of a violent history will have a vastly different interpretation of their role in the historical event than their victims.

The current administration takes issue with institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) providing counter-hegemonic understandings of race and racism and their permanence in American life. This is an attack on the work our organization here at Kinfolk has been committed to. They accuse social justice forward organizations and people of being ideologically driven instead of uplifting. But their attempt to enforce a more selective telling of the truth about history is, too, ideological. The most accurate telling of historical events involves uncomfortable truths, not just to shame but to strengthen and learn from these events so as not to recommit them. Of course, we are in a place where historical injustices are being recommitted. So it seems there should be more of a concerted effort to tell the truth of our history rather than the contrary.

Altar to Our Ancestors

Honoring those who came before us

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou was an acclaimed American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist best known for her groundbreaking autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which explored themes of racism, trauma, and resilience.

🔎 Explore Maya in the Kinfolk App. Download the Kinfolk App on your mobile device to bring a part of her world into your home.

Digital Erasure and the Unreliability of Top-Down Information

The rise of digital erasure under the current White House administration poses a significant threat to public memory and historical accountability. In recent years, there have been growing concerns over the removal or alteration of digital records, including government websites, press releases, and social media content, that shape public understanding of policy decisions, social issues, and historical events. This practice, whether framed as routine updates or deliberate obfuscation, risks distorting the historical record, making it harder for citizens, journalists, and researchers to track changes in official stances, hold leaders accountable, or access vital information. When public records disappear without transparent archiving, it fuels distrust in institutions and undermines democratic transparency.

There have been numerous instances of the government purging thousands of digital records, archives, or just removing valuable information from governmental websites. Most recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that anti-racist books be removed from the Naval Academy’s Library, but literature upholding white supremacist values was allowed to remain. Maya Angelou’s iconic and intimate memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was among the purges, while two copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf remained on the shelves. So, too, were books like Memorializing the Holocaust purged, which documented the experiences of female Holocaust victims. The Naval Academy explicitly decided to ban nearly 400 books, and an overwhelming number of them were about or written by oppressed people. Of course, this is an expression and consequence of the Naval Academy’s own racialized and imperialist history.

The lack of democratic control over data, information, and digital platforms has helped pave the way for the technofascism that is currently governing our lives. Ordinary people have very little control over narrative, discourses, and how news and information are broadcasted—which is having a dire impact on the social well-being of everyone including children who do have access to the internet and what they are being exposed to is directly curated by the worst economic and political actors of our society. 

But this brings the question whether we should even want institutions that have overwhelmingly been sites of colonial and imperialist domination to be in complete control of the information of our history. One of the gravest tasks of the 2020s will be forging new avenues of storing information—both digitally and in person—safely and securely, as it is becoming clear that the government cannot be relied upon to do such a thing. It is of the utmost importance to take it upon ourselves to assume such a role of housing information, accurate retelling of history, news, and archival data, in a way that is widely accessible to ordinary people.

That’s exactly the work Kinfolk is taking on. As governments purge archives and tech platforms delete our histories from memory, we are building a digital public space where those histories not only survive, but thrive for generations to come. Through augmented reality monuments and community-driven storytelling, Kinfolk offers a radical alternative: a future where we don’t just preserve the past, but actively reimagine it. In the face of erasure, we are creating our own archives—ones that are accessible, participatory, and rooted in collective memory and cultural power.

Dreaming Out Loud

Pathways to new worlds

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Until next time,

josh, ravon, idris and the Kinfolk team