Show Me the Money: Put Tubman on the Twenty

I’ll readily admit that the face gracing the $20 bill is not our most urgent issue - not with 420,000 people needlessly dead and 45 Republican senators saying that their insurrectionist in exile should get a pass.

But we can all agree that symbols are important, define who we are as a people and help us craft our national narrative.

So, in that sense, it surely matters whether the face on the $20 bill depicts a racist genocidal white guy who enslaved human beings or a Black woman who repeatedly risked her life to successfully free human beings. The good news is that the Biden administration intends to right a wrong by putting Harriet Tubman where she belongs.

As press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, “The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put (Tubman) on the front of the new $20 notes. It’s important that our money reflect the history and diversity of our country.”

Well, yeah. White men weren’t the only people who built this nation. Black women have never appeared on American currency. Tubman, a fugitive slave and heroine of the Underground Railroad, rescued hundreds of African-Americans from servitude. She was a Union spy during the Civil War, recruited ex-slaves for a Union regiment, and led an assault that freed 700 more. In her late 70s she delivered speeches for women’s suffrage, but died seven years before women won the right to vote.

Wait, let me back up a bit. Did Jen Psaki say that the Biden administration wants to “resume” the process to put Tubman on the $20 bill? When did that process start - and why did it stop?

Take a wild guess why it stopped.

Back in 2016, President Obama’s Treasury secretary announced a plan to replace facial incumbent Andrew Jackson starting in 2020. But that plan was quickly shelved during the MAGA occupation. As the MAGA candidate had signaled during the 2016 campaign, when asked about replacing Jackson with Tubman, “I don’t like seeing it. I think it’s pure political correctness.”

In his mind, the reality of racial diversity - and the truth of our national narrative - was “political correctness.” And he was reportedly blunter in conversation with White House aides. According to Omarosa Manigault Newman, the ex-aide who last year wrote the book Unhinged, her racist boss told her what he really thought about Tubman: “You want me to put that face on the $20 bill?”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was thus tasked with telling Congress that the switch to Tubman was unfeasible because of “security” concerns, something to do with unspecified “counterfeiting issues.” And so the woman who once said that “slavery is the next thing to well” was thereby consigned to the back of the bus.

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