Everything really is bigger in Texas—including the jackassery of its lawmakers. Not content with simply being the state that waited more than TWO F**KING YEARS to acknowledge the Emancipation Proclamation and finally tell enslaved Black people that they were free, the Lone Star State now wants to whitewash the brutality of its past misdeeds altogether, lest its young people get the exact right idea about the atrocities of slavery.
As Raw Story reports, a group of state educators have submitted a proposal to the Texas State Board of Education that when second-grade social studies students get to that part of American history where our lawmakers thought it was totally cool to violently capture African people from their home country, ship them halfway across the world, then trade them like chattel, we might want to use a less damning word than “slavery.” Their choice? “Involuntary relocation.”
The proposed language change comes in response to a recently passed state law which instructs educators to avoid discussing topics that could make students “feel discomfort” and that, as Raw Story writes, “slavery can’t be taught as part of the true founding of the United States and that slavery was nothing more than a deviation from American values.” As such, the proposal actually states that teachers should “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times.”
Ummmm…
Fortunately, not everyone in Texas is as apathetic or as ignorant as its top lawmakers like governor Greg Abbott, who thought it would be funny to bus migrants to Washington, DC; lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who’s currently attempting to push a “Don’t Say Gay” bill similar to Florida’s in the state; or senator Ted “The Ooze” Cruz, who, well, just—yuck.
Stephanie Alvarez, a University of Texas Rio Grande Valley professor who is a member of the group that’s pushing this change—but was not at the meetings where this language switcheroo was decided—says she finds the whole idea of attempting to erase this tragic part of history “extremely disturbing.”
Harvard University history professor Annette Gordon-Reed, meanwhile, sees it as disturbing and dangerous—and a way to set the country back. “Tell children the truth,” she told Raw Story. “They can handle it.”
(Via Raw Story)