MAGA War on Architectural Diversity Weaponizes Greek Columns

I was passing by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington the other afternoon when the raking winter sun made the patterned, bronzed-aluminum facade glow. The building seemed to warm its patch of a frozen National Mall, alongside the chilly phalanx of gray stone behemoths, nearly all classically designed.

Style-wise, I don’t know what to call the museum’s architecture. David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect, led the design team. The building is classicizing, with its base and capital, at the same time that those patterns on...