The Texas State Board of Education approved standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses Friday. That is national news because of Texas’ huge role in shaping textbooks across the country. Given that conservative Christians dominate the board, the result was predictable.
Among other things, the 15-member panel:
- Rejected efforts to teach kids that the United States was founded on the principle of religious freedom, but added references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” to a section on political ideas;
- Specified mention of the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—in a section about the Bill of Rights;
- Agreed to require that economics students “analyze the decline of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard”;
- Refused to consider including hip-hop as a significant cultural movement.
Most telling of all, the board beat back repeated attempts to include Latinos in Texas history. Before the final vote Friday, the board argued over an amendment to require students to learn about Tejanos who died at the Battle of the Alamo.
Democratic board member Mary Helen Berlanga made the common sense observation that these men died at the Alamo just the same as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, yet they are almost completely ignored in Texas classrooms. Republican Pat Hardy countered that “it would be awkward to say that teachers and student should identify people who died at the Alamo.”
Dispelling the long-held myth that the Texas Revolution was an all-white struggle might be awkward for some. But the need for it is obvious. The Alamo is the seminal event in the birth of Texas, and today more than 46 percent of public school children in that state are Latino. As Berlanga put it, “We can’t just pretend that this is white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
Of course, that is exactly what the board is trying to do. But it’s this kind of in-your-face cultural warfare that angers most Americans. And it is this kind of racial injustice that is guaranteed to be remembered by the country’s growing Latino population. Conservatives may have for now seized the historical narrative in Texas classrooms. But they won’t be able to hang on to it. There are to many people who want to remember the Alamo—the way it really happened.