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.
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 1: A Survey of the “Traditional Civil Rights Discourse” : The Front Porch “Traditional Civil Rights discourse predates and dispels allegations of cultural Marxism.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 2: The Segregationist Discourse and Civil Rights Retrenchment : The Front Porch “To tell the story of the rise of critical race theory historically, we have to consider the segregationist and anti-Civil Rights context that spawned it.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 3: A Bridge: Dr. Derrick Bell : The Front Porch “Bell’s work signaled a return to the more “radical” elements of W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver C. Cox, Stokely Carmichael, and even Dr. King.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 4: Alan Freeman and the Contribution of CLS : The Front Porch “Laws reflect dominant social morality and power distribution. That’s why our laws are more likely to legitimize racism and racist systems than remedy them.”
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.
Previously,
- The Segregationist Discourse
- The Long Southern Strategy and the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
- White Resentment: The Grand Bargain of White Supremacy
- The Breathtaking Bigotry of Unreconstructed America
- Spiritual Warfare and the Politics of Paranoia and Providentialism
- “Those Burning Crosses Are Symbols of Evangelicalism”
- Trinity of Toxic Nonsense: White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Purity Culture
- I Cannot, and Will Not, Believe in That God: Libraries as Candles in the Dark
- Purity Culture, the False Gender Binary, and Abuse at Heritage Christian School
- Empty the Pews of Toxic Christianity
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