The September issue of Texas Monthly reports on the Texas school book controversy that has been simmering since 2010. That’s when the Texas State Board of Education adopted new curriculum standards that, it was argued at the time, attempted to coax publishers into producing student textbooks that downplayed the historical realities of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Well, now those textbooks have been published, and while they are not yet available to the general public, TexMo’s Tom Bartlett reports that those who have perused them don’t believe they are as bad as many feared.
Happily, though, publishers mostly ignored the board, according to Dan Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, an organization dedicated to countering what it sees as far-right activism. “I think publishers did a good job of making sure of the centrality of slavery,” he says. Quinn, who perhaps more than anyone has sounded the alarm about the board’s bias, was distressed to read national reports asserting incorrectly that Texas children wouldn’t be reading about the KKK and Jim Crow. “The textbooks cover all of that,” he says.
Well, Jezebel takes exception to that assessment. In an extensive post examining sections of the textbooks obtained by the website, Jezebel’s Bobby Finger takes a detailed look at how the new books actually treat these topics. Finger argues that while facts about the brutality of racism and discrimination in American history are included, if you read the text carefully, there is a kind of whitewashing going on in the way the books juxtapose negative aspects of slavery with more positive references to African-American culture, music, and religion:
This “it wasn’t all bad!” structure isn’t the only problem with the book’s discussion of slavery and racism in the United States. The roughest truths are often softened around the edges, sometimes by the addition of just one word. On page 425 of Texas United States History, we learn that, “Generally, slaveholders viewed slaves as property, not as people.” Generally.
The Jezebel piece dives into a few sections from that textbook in detail, and the way it examines how subtly the language works makes the post worth reading. It shows how the inclusion of difficult facts or even first-hand accounts from former slaves can be softened or muddled by a clever turn of phrase or the specific choice of words. Here’s an example Jezebel pulls from the new textbook that I found particularly telling:
The Klan also believed in keeping blacks “in their place,” destroying saloons, opposing unions, and driving Roman Catholics, Jews, and foreign-born people out of the country. KKK members were paid to recruit new members into their world of secret rituals and racial violence.
Notice what that sentence is doing? Sure, it is saying that the KKK brutalized African-Americans, or at least “kept them in their place,” whatever that might mean. But in the same breath it also associates African-Americans with what is often considered scornful behavior in right-wing circles: excessive drinking and unionizing. Jezebel offers a more direct description of what the KKK’s effort to keep “blacks ‘in their place'” really meant, borrowing an account in W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America.
Lawlessness and violence filled the land, and terror stalked abroad by day, and it burned and murdered by night. The Southern states had actually relapsed into barbarism…Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites.
See, it’s all in the language. Even though the new Texas textbooks are not as bad as some feared, I think it is safe to say that the war over language, and how it is used to describe our history, still rages on.
