Huh. Well, you can’t just believe everything you read on Twitter. I’m going to fact check this. It is far too ridiculous to assume that this is true. I mean, we all know they’re racists and they know we know that they know we know but they don’t think that we have any real proof because to them it isn’t racist if you don’t say the N word out loud. So they certainly wouldn’t, just a few weeks after Juneteenth, suggest that teachers must not tell their students that the KKK is morally wrong.

Anyway, I found a Huffpost link that links directly to the bill. So here’s the bill, hosted at capitol.texas.gov. 

Sure enough, “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” is listed under things teachers “may not” do.

Since I started writing, they’ve removed the offensive language. It was absolutely true – they wanted our civics classes to NOT provide the context of racism when discussing the KKK. Which is like trying to discuss the composition of water without mentioning the two Hydrogen atoms.

Left in the bill is something just as ridiculous, just in case you thought this improvement made it better:

 

an individual, by virtue of the individual ’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;**

an individual should feel discomfort,
guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual ’s race or sex;

It all comes down to the poor snowflakes who can’t stand to learn the facts: an economic system based on race-based slavery inescapable by birth was perpetrated by people with the same skin color as them. I’m not sure why the state of Texas wants children to be taught that their actions won’t have any impact on future generations since they clearly want to teach that the actions of the past have no effect on our current situation. Generational poverty, racism, and oppression? Naah, throw that out and pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

I find it blatantly hypocritical that they’re giving the teachers the ability to tell children the facts of what happened but forcing them to not talk about any type of shame or guilt that a child might feel over what their ancestors did, and yet they didn’t want those same teachers the room to teach the context of what the racists did and why they did it. This is the same reason half of the deep south believes with all their hearts (bless them) that the civil war was fought over state rights.

Recently, I discovered a newspaper article where my husband’s 3rd great grandfather was named as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I showed the genealogical evidence to my husband and children and they were all proud and happy that they come from a long line of abolitionists. We have no slaveholders in our history. We have no more control over that than anyone else and who they are born to, yet I feel pride in these facts.

Either way, let’s leave education up to the educators and allow them to teach context where it is appropriate.

In the 10th grade, my history teacher taught me that slaves were better off with their “masters” because they had nowhere to go when they were freed. That’s a statement that was missing a LOT of context. Funny that the Texas legislature never made sure teachers didn’t teach that to their students.