Texas’ new American history text books won’t include:
The Ku Klux Klan
Jim Crow Laws
The primary role of slavery in the Civil War
And that’s just the beginning. Facts on segregation are almost completely missing. All of this is, of course, by design.
“Texas, where 11.6% of the population is black, 38.2% is Latino and 44.4% is white, will likely influence curricula in other states, as this state alone is involved in the sale of 48 million textbooks each year, influencing publishers across the country. According to the National Education Association, no other state aside from California has that much influence in the textbook world.”
This is just disgusting. There is no way of telling the history of the United States without discussing the institutionalized oppression of Jim Crow, and the Civil War was unambiguously about slavery.
I mean, read The Declaration of Immediate Causes, South Carolina’s explanation for seceding, in which the state of South Carolina itself announces that it is leaving the Union due to “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery.” It then encourages other slave-holding states to secede (which most did), so that they could create a nation, The Confederate States of America, in which there will be less hostility toward slavery.
Insofar as the Civil War was about states rights, it was about a state’s right to decide whether slavery should be legal. People knew that in 1860, and they should damn well know it now.
