Texas Republicans: Upholding White Supremacist Mythology with the Power of Law

Republicans in the Texas House passed a bill Tuesday that effectively bans public school teachers from talking about racism, white supremacy or current news events.

Source: Texas GOP Passes Bill To Stop Teachers From Talking About Racism | HuffPost

Texas is awash in bills aimed at fending off critical examinations of the state’s past.

Source: Texas Eyes Laws to Limit Teaching Slavery in Classrooms – The New York Times

The Republican Party habitually inverts American history and the moral universe while quelling speech about actual American history. I grew up in Texas public education. We learned the Southern Strategy, the Confederate Catechism, the Lost Cause, and the Traditional Segregationist Discourse. We were taught a pile of racist, revisionist nonsense. I still recall a 7th grade history teacher yelling at us for saying the Civil War was about slavery, drilling “states’ rights” into us instead. Texas schools teach such white supremacist mythology to this day.

Critical Race Theory, a bogeyman and straw man for White evangelicals and the GOP, is rooted in Traditional Civil Rights Discourse. Both are necessary parts of K-12 curriculum. “The Front Porch” has a great series on CRT framed for White Christians that I wish my toxic Christian representatives would read in good faith.

But there is not a drop of good faith in my Republican representatives, nor in groups like the College Republicans, who direct the conservative outrage machine against institutions who haven’t hardened against it, resulting in the firing of journalists, teachers, and professors.

If you belong to, report on, or teach about a marginalized group, you’re an “activist” who will be harassed and hounded out of work.

Institutions must harden against Republican bad faith and protect us as we tell the truth and lay bare the mythology.

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