Days after starting his second term, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that targeted DEI programs and policies for elimination, decrying them as illegal and immoral. Museums across the country scrambled to react — and in many cases, comply. Within days, Washington’s National Gallery of Art announced it would close its office of belonging and inclusion and remove the words “diversity, equity, access and inclusion” from its list of values on its website. Five days later, the Smithsonian followed suit.
But the Japanese American National Museum, a relatively small institution in downtown Los Angeles, chose a different path. Founded in 1992 at the site of a historic Buddhist temple in L.A.’s Little Tokyo, the museum took a stand against Trump and his anti-DEI edicts while other museums acquiesced. Two weeks after the Smithsonian shuttered its DEI office and stripped its websites of DEI-related language, JANM’s leaders announced that they would not waver from their commitment to DEI or their mission of telling the full truth about the Japanese American experience, World War II incarceration camps and all. We will scrub nothing, JANM announced, in what would become a slogan for the museum’s defiance. That stance came with significant risks: At stake were millions in federal grants from institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
