Texas wants to suppress our history, too - The Washington Post

As Texas opens up from the coronavirus pandemic, the state’s Republican legislators are doing their best to close the mouths of Texas teachers — and the minds of Texas children.

Texas House Bill 3979 has been framed as an attempt by the GOP to restrict the teaching of critical race theory in the state’s schools. The bill does, in fact, aim to limit the teaching of the New York Times’s influential 1619 Project, in an initial version going so far as to argue that slavery and racism should be understood as “deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.”

Indeed, if the raggedy cliche “this is not who we are” was a piece of legislation, H.B. 3979 would be it. But more than that, the fervent pursuit of this terrible bill is really about the two B-words always in orbit around any moment of racial reckoning in America: backlash and blame.

There can be no doubt that the bill’s attacks on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project and critical race theory more broadly are part of a larger White backlash to the mainstreaming of non-White scholarship and political ideas. It has become conservative boilerplate to blast critiques of systemic racism as un-American; just this week, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the driving force behind 1619, was denied a tenured position at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, over the recommendation of the journalism school.

And that second B-word — blame — lies at the emotional heart of this backlash.

In a recent Post op-ed, the writer Brian Broome argued that the aim of Texas’s bill is to keep White children ignorant. He’s right, of course, and the key question is why. Advocates want to use schoolchildren’s education not only as a means to preserve the myth of White innocence, but also to avoid the questions about White responsibility for correcting injustices in our multiracial democracy.

Here’s how state Rep. Steven Toth (R), lead author of the bill, put it: “We have to talk about all the evils of our past without blaming white children simply because of the color of their skin.” The bill would bar any requirement that teachers participate in training “that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race.” No course, it says, should entertain the concept that an individual could be “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Crucially, this isn’t just about the suppression of history, either, but suppression of the present. The bill says no teacher can be compelled to discuss “current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” — and any teacher who takes up such an issue would have to explore it through “contending perspectives.” In other words, both sides — or no discussion at all — of police shootings of Black people, or Republican lawmakers trying to make it harder for Texans to have their voices heard at the ballot box.

Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, in which a thriving Black community was destroyed by a White mob. Will Texas students learn anything about this history — which remains so alive today in the fact that the survivors and descendants of the victims continue to be denied justice and reparations? How on earth can this event begin to be understood without talking about inherent racism? Are there “contending perspectives” on a massacre?

It feels to me like it is by a dark design that such attacks on critical race theory and the protection of White innocence in classrooms are coming at a moment when the idea of Black reparations for White violence are gaining political currency.

H.B. 3979 would also actively discourage schools from incentivizing students to participate in social or public policy advocacy, particularly from “efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication.” And that, to me, is the most depressing provision of all — the way its backers want to prevent students from becoming civically engaged to make their state and country a better place. It goes against the very idea of democratic education, which is to help children become adults who will do their part to help build a more just society. It’s like passing a law against hope.

It is also a Texas-sized hypocrisy. The state’s GOP, once the party of personal responsibility, now wants to prevent students from learning about their civic responsibility to help correct racial injustice. And in that, they are teaching us all a valuable lesson: From Tulsa in 1921 to Texas in 2021, White backlash always follows Black political and academic progress.

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Texas wants to suppress our history, too - The Washington Post
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