You’ve gotta’ hand it to Texas Republicans. Not satisfied with controlling state politics for the last 30 years, they have introduced a bill that cautions teachers in civics and history classes to tiptoe around teaching about the history of slavery and racism.
Their boogeyman appears to be The Critical Race Theory. I am sure that not one of the representatives who voted for this bill can even define what that theory is. The sponsor of the bill is Representative Steve Toth who hails from Conroe, and is a part-time preacher and ultra conservative. His previous bills limited abortion rights and wanted unlimited gun rights for all. Representative Toth’s bill will limit what a teacher can tell her students about the history of slavery in the U.S. since 1619. The penalty for disobeying this new law is unknown at this time. We may be seeing a modern-day Scopes Monkey Trial like the one in evangelical Tennessee in the 1920s to test the constitutionality of this absurd piece of legislation.
Will this Bill prohibit teachers from informing students that black and brown students were legally forced to attend segregated schools until the 1960’s? Can the teacher tell the class that Mexican Americans in Texas could be legally excluded from jury service until the 1950s? All of these racial restrictions were signed into law by all-White legislators. Will students not be able to hear that all county courthouses built more than 65 years ago, were built with balconies for Blacks and Latinos, as depicted in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird?
Will teachers be forbidden to teach that one of the primary reasons for Texas independence was so that Texas could become another slave state? Will the story of Native American genocide by U.S. troops be suppressed and will we pretend they never existed as Rick Santorum suggested a few weeks ago? Can they teach that the leaders at the defense of the Alamo, were mostly slave holders? Can they teach that Mexican President Vicente Guerrero, the first Black/Indian Mexican President, abolished slavery in 1829, seven years before the battle of the Alamo that sat on Mexican soil?
Will this law prevent teachers from telling their classes that the University of Texas at Austin, my alma mater, did not admit the first African American undergraduate until 1956? Will they be permitted to tell their students that in 1913, a Bill was introduced by a McAllen representative to form Jim Hogg County, where I was born and raised, to “get out from under the domination of the Mexican vote at the other end of Brooks County”? After the Bill passed, the Legislature appointed the Commissioner’s Court, the County Judge and the County Sheriff, all white gentlemen of course. Never mind that the newly formed county was 90% Hispanic.
I earned my MA in education in 1972. I taught for two years at Northside I.S.D. in San Antonio. No principal ever told me to be very careful what I taught young minds.
Today’s Republicans want to control the curriculum in the classroom to destroy history. Will Rep. Toth introduce a bill to redact all references to slavery in the Bible? Perhaps Representative Richard Raymond can enlighten us as to why he was the lone Democrat to join every Republican in support of this bill.
George Orwell, author of the book 1984 stated: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” Mr. Orwell also stated: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.”
Nobel Prize winning humanitarian and author Elie Weisel wrote: “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory there would be no civilization, no society, no future”.
And how about those Texas Rangers turning mesquite trees into “strange fruit” trees with Mexican AMERICANS hanging from their thorny limbs?