Texas Senate Passes Bill Ditching Requirement To Teach Kids The KKK Was Bad

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Ku Klux Klan gathering in Muncie Indiana in 1922

Photo via Garaoihana/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

July 20, 2021, 1:15 pm

The Texas Senate, at the behest of Governor Greg Abbott, passed a bill with a Republican majority vote that eliminates part of a current law requiring public schools to teach that things like slavery, eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, and other aspects of white supremacy are morally wrong. The vote occurred during a special session to which Abbott specifically added the topic of Critical Race Theory, which is only taught in high-level university programs but which Republicans would like you to think is being introduced in Kindergarten.

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Texas Senate Bill 3 literally strikes out the state requirement that formerly stated that schools must address “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.”

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Additionally, the bill eliminates the requirement for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to be part of the curriculum, as well as Native American history and Susan B. Anthony’s writings on the women’s suffrage movement.

If you were wondering, this is part of the reason why Texas Democrats peaced out of the state, and thanks to themm the bill is unlikely to pass in the state House.

This move appears to be part of a larger conservative backlash to movements to end white supremacy in the U.S., including the Black Lives Matter movement and the creation of The 1619 Project, which tells the nation’s history from a Black perspective. Republicans then caught wind of the term “Critical Race Theory” and have been using that as a boogeyman to frighten people already scared of words like “race” and “critical” and “theory.”

What Texas teachers will be allowed to teach about the less flattering aspects of our history, which not long ago Republicans were fighting to “preserve” in the form of confederate monuments, will be restricted by vague language about not giving “deference to any one perspective.” So if, for example, a Texas public school teacher wanted to address something like a massacre in a Black church by an actual white supremacist, they could get in trouble for pressing the perspective that such a thing is bad, actually.

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“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust, or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?” asked Democratic state Senator Judith Zaffirini.

Meanwhile, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick praised the bill, claiming that it rejects “philosophies that espouse that one race or sex is better than another.” Apparently, teaching real history about how people of historically oppressed races and genders fought to end philosophies that espouse that one race or sex is better than another is somehow doing that exact thing, because everything is bigger in Texas, including insanity.

Those who still think it’s a good idea to teach kids that the KKK was a bad thing and include the history of people who were not just white men are wondering how exactly Texas Republicans are going to pretend they’re not racist and why anybody should buy it.

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*First Published: July 20, 2021, 1:15 pm

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