SOUND THE ALARM. TEXAS IS ABOUT TO REWRITE HISTORY IN FAVOR OF WHITE MEN.

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Revisionaries:How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.


...


On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious” treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans.

Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men. MORE

Yo. This shit is SERIOUS. Hell needs to be raised.

Comments

[paradox-dragon.livejournal.com]

I am a teacher in Texas. We have been tearing our hair about this shit for months (well, some of us) and it is awful. The state of our textbooks is already deplorable, we don't need to make them worse.

Edited because I can't use verbs.

[claws-n-stripes.livejournal.com]

Why can't they just fucking secede? Seriously, having Texas is doing more harm than good.

if you want to see some of the actual rhetoric at the state hearing

[paradox-dragon.livejournal.com]

coverage and quotes from the sbec hearings in september:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/texas-textbook-hearings/2009/09/

it may make you cry, i warn you.

[fa-ikaika.livejournal.com]

Don't mess with texas because the stupid messed it up already.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is more honest to say that your government is republican rather than democratic, votes did not count for much in 2000, after all ...

[the-willow.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

http://tfninsider.org/

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

This is truly horrifying. As someone with a lot of publishing experience who worked, briefly (I quiet before my five-month contract expired), in the textbook industry, I have to echo the completely outsized power that Texas has. It's completely insane for certain jurisdictions (including California and Iowa) to hold sway over the entire country, but they do. (We literally had to meet "ink allowances" per page on workbooks, because of what these schools require parents to pay for both paper and photocopy toner.)

I too am at a loss for how to deal with this, though.

[janradder.livejournal.com]

HOLY CRAP.