Historians are important to keep one's head in the face of hagiography. I was already angry about Barbara Bush's racism getting a pass when Prof. @nomimurphy posted these wise insights into the harms she, the Bushes & their veneer of respectability waged on HIV/AIDS. 
I find it weird Barbara Bush is being hailed for "literacy" when she did nothing to address racial inequality in literacy. (This news is parroted by a news media which often seems to have little sense of historic literacy.)
Prof. @nomimurphy also brings how the danger of national amnesia is particularly dangerous when it is wrapped up in the trope of the national mother of one Barbara Bush: it both erases suffering poor/non-white mothers while re-inscribing the very heteronormative norms which...
...have led to the catastrophe of HIV/AIDS in the first place! And it lends itself to disregarding the poor people evacuated from New Orleans (including mothers and children) whom Bush implied were dangerous freeloaders looking to ghettoize her (white imagined) Houston
Like his fellow Twin Cities-ite @Lollardfish, @nomimurphy ties together the ways racism, ableism, & patriarchy conspire together—& how important a bulwark history is in moments of collective amnesia, esp. with Trump around to give a CLO for the Bushes
Now, a day later, I am considering all of this in relation to how US obituaries manufactured guilt with Mandela and innocence with Bush
