A trip to Washington, DC would not be complete without a visit to the National Archives Rotunda, a grandiose building on Pennsylvania Avenue where the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights – the fundamental documents on America's founding – are on public display behind bulletproof glass.

The security measures, however, have done nothing to protect the prized papers, or even the ornate building that houses them, from the toxic political climate that has come to pervade every corner of the nation. That much was made clear in a just-discovered report by the Archivist's Task Force on Racism, which went to extreme lengths to show how "the structural nature of racism… unequivocally impacts how NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) staff interact with records, colleagues, and customers."