In the dimly lit, subterranean galleries of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, some of the country’s most devastating truths are revealed in a manner that is neither gentle nor blurred. It’s here that individual Americans face the artefacts of their shared story, one that includes freight ships brimming with human cargo, freedom-seeking patriots who once shackled and tormented children with less regard than we now afford livestock, and a foundational system of governance and economics that was rooted in the dehumanisation of Black people.

By design, the galleries devoted to this part of American history are claustrophobic. And make no mistake, this is American history in the most collective sense of the word. There’s no way to make these realities less disturbing. It is a lie that there were no oppressors or victims.

The stories are complicated, and so are the people involved, but those complications don’t erase a profound fact, which is that this country began with a singular, terrible sin. And when we ultimately broke free of it, the after-effects shattered into countless smaller sins — some obvious to the naked eye, others more of an invisible ache. But like bits of jagged glass, they have drifted through the cultural bloodstream, never fully dissolving, always suspended.

These galleries are filled with many of the facts that Donald Trump and his administration would like to make disappear or simply ignore. This desire has been made clear in the editing of the history taught in schools, in the removal of references to diversity and equity from the Government, in the belief that a meritocracy will exist simply because the President declares that it does, in Trump’s attempts to bully people into thinking only what he wants them to think even if it contradicts what they have seen with their own eyes and felt within their heart.

And yet, on a cold and windy Presidents’ Day holiday weekend, in the middle of Black History Month, people are here at the Blacksonian, as it is sometimes called. Despite everything. Because of it all. They’re here absorbing information about Black soldiers in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and every other war even though the Defence Department has all but forbidden acknowledgement of this diversity within its realm. They are here learning about Phillis Wheatley and her groundbreaking poetry even as Trump devalues the unique expertise and experiences of women — especially Black women — as just DEI pandering.

The visitors at the museum are as diverse as the country. They are Black and White. Young, older and elderly. Men and women. Skinny twentysomethings in sneakers with bushy beards, paunchy guys with buzz cuts wearing fleece zip-ups. Elementary school-age children whiz through the galleries in matching orange T-shirts, followed by their beleaguered chaperones trying to get them to slow down and “shhhsh”.

Moving deliberately and confidently through this humanity is a museum guide. A white-haired woman with the patient demeanour of a retired teacher - “Questions? Does anyone have questions?” She practically pleads for questions, with the tone of someone who loves nothing more than explaining and expounding. She isn’t offering a sanitised timeline of slavery in America: a vague Middle Passage; something about cotton, tobacco and plantations; then Harriett Tubman, Frederick Douglass and on to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr and dreams coming true because the country elected Barack Obama.

Hers is a slow, considered story of how America came to be, with all its contradictions; that Whiteness wouldn’t exist were it not for the American Founding Fathers’ need for Blackness. “Do you have questions? Walk with me.”

She is a marvel navigating difficult material and hurtful subject matter with grace and clarity. Her language is not “woke”, but it is specific, as language should always strive to be. Humans were “trafficked”. People were “enslaved”; they were not slaves. She doesn’t just speak to the physical aspects of slavery but the psychological ones, too. She underscores the knowledge and wisdom and traditions that Africans brought with them to America even as they lost everything else. She bemoans the erasure of languages.

The guide is trailed by visitors who are soaking in the information. Who are rapt. Each word she speaks rebukes an administration that wants to police knowledge. Each step visitors take as they follow behind her is proof that folks of all stripes are tough enough to hear stories about race and racism without crumbling. Americans are not as fragile as Trump seems to believe. They certainly are not as fragile as their president.

The people can survive the truth. They do so each time they walk through the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or the National September 11 Memorial and Museum; when they visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the National Memorial for Peace and Justice … or the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Perhaps they even emerge having been enlightened or inspired. None of these places do what Trump and his ilk would have museums and monuments do. They eschew distant, federal-style architecture and design; instead, they incorporate the visitor into the very meaning of the structure.

They don’t encourage visitors to shrug off the past and just focus on the future. They don’t camouflage pain with false patriotism.

More than ten million visitors have come in person to the Museum of African-American History and Culture since it opened in 2016. They come even as the President has unleashed his pettiness on the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts because he didn’t like the programming. They come despite businesses cowering under his demands to abolish any overt efforts to learn from history and be better. They come to rejoice over the country’s progress without denying the road that lies ahead.

“This museum will tell the American story through the lens of African-American history and culture. This is America’s Story, and this museum is for all Americans,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum’s founding director.

Visitors come to learn. And to feel. They come to see and hear about themselves and this country. And in the process, they can improve upon both.

• Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press