Before Donald Trump came into office, plans were well underway for former slave and famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman to appear on the $20 bill in place of Andrew Jackson, a slaveowning racist President.
Once he became President, however, that plan was abandoned. Trump would not go down in history as the first American head of state to usher in non-white people on the currency.
I thought about this controversy when the news was announced yesterday that, in Great Britain, my native land, Alan Turing would appear on the new £50 note (details here). Turing, of course, is famous for both beig a gay man and also the one who lead the effort to break the Nazi's Enigma code, something which ensured an Allied victory, made D-Day a success, and shortened World War II by months if not years.
Britain has a conservative head of state yet it's progressive enough to embrace LGBT people in its culture and celebrate their achievements. Yet in the United States, the White House is controlled by someone so regressive that a woman of color had to be removed from its currency because she was not white.
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