Editor's Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Gov. Greg Abbott chose to honor Black History Month by discouraging state officials from diligently searching for qualified minorities to hire.
In a leaked early February memo obtained by the Texas Tribune, Abbott's chief of staff warned government agencies and public universities to abandon Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs which purportedly "favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others." Such a suspect framing suggests a not-so-subtle ploy to stoke white fears over alleged preferential treatment afforded to racial minorities. To publicly justify the move, the memo paints initiatives that cast a wider net when looking for job applicants as violating anti-discrimination law.
Andrew Eckhous, an employment lawyer at Kaplan Law Firm in Austin, told the Current that Governor Abbott "is conflating DEI initiatives — which are meant to increase the diversity of people who apply for a job — with quotas. They're not the same thing."
Eckhous went on to explain that DEI functions as "a catch-all term that's been turned into a bogeyman in certain political circles, just like Critical Race Theory."
The State of the State Address Abbott delivered last Thursday was even less coded. "Schools should not push woke agendas," the Republican governor declared.
For Abbott, the evident purpose of education is to manufacture what he calls "employable Texans," not critical thinkers, and the GOP-controlled legislature is willing to usurp the role of the Texas Education Agency to impose a top-down curriculum by legislative fiat that the Antebellum South could be proud of.
But we know what the polite euphemism of "school choice" really means and what scaring parents over "woke agendas" is designed to do: divert much-needed funding from public schools in the service of an all-but-explicit soft privatization.
One would think Abbott has already secured his anti-"woke" bonafides. Thanks to him, Section 28 of the Texas Education Code now reads, "A teacher may not require an understanding of the 1619 Project."
The 1619 Project is a Pulitzer Prize-winning achievement in historical journalism that reinterprets the nation's founding from the perspective of the mass abduction and enslavement of Africans. A corresponding documentary series streaming on Hulu is a tour de force of ethnomusicologists, labor historians and civil rights activists interspersed with news footage and archival deep dives.
Like all good pedagogy, it's an exploration, not a doctrinaire set of answers. Six episodes cover the absurdity of "box-checking" racial classification systems, the finding of joy and humanity through music in the midst of apartheid and the inseparability of chattel slavery from late-stage capitalism, in particular of the slave patrols of old and the trigger-happy policing driving Black Lives Matter protests today.
"If you don't have slave-grown cotton, you don't have an American industrial revolution, it's as simple as that," Brown University historian Seth Rockman says in the series.
And the meticulousness of the metrics used to squeeze the most productivity out of plantation slaves eerily mirrors the surveillance of modern warehouses run by Amazon.
"The truth is, we all know someone who stayed in a job they hated because they needed healthcare or because they felt powerless to demand better," Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, explains during the series' narration. "And while Black workers might have it the worst, we all suffer under this uniquely brutal and unequal system of capitalism that was born on the plantation."
The 1619 Project itself helps explain why Abbott's divisive politics have proven so strategic. Conservatives perennially stoke culture wars then blame the victims for instigating them. And white elites exploited race to divide the interracial labor organizing which could have meant higher wages and better working conditions for all workers.
"When I grew up in Longview and Duncanville, we were taught the basics — reading, writing, math, and science," Abbott waxed nostalgic during last week's speech. "We were inspired by our country's founding and how it stands apart from the rest of the world as the beacon of liberty and opportunity."
This romanticism contrasts with one of the Project's basic theses: that a primary motivating factor for seceding from Britain was the preservation of slavery.
Consider Thomas Jefferson's 27th grievance against King George in the Declaration of Independence: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages."
"Domestic insurrections" meant slave revolts just in case anyone is unsure.
The loyalist Earl of Dunmore, for example, who governed Virginia in 1775, offered slaves their freedom if they fought on the side of the British, both enraging and galvanizing the colonists.
Woody Holton, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, confessed the poor quality of his own childhood education: "If slaves had been as passive as I was taught they were in Virginia schools in the 1960s, then the Revolution might never have come to the South, and you can't win the Revolution without the South."
Don't parents have a right to expect an update to the history textbooks Abbott and Holton read as kids?
The 1619 Project should have been our generation's Roots, but the forces of right-wing extremism are far more mainstream than they were in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Talking-points traditionally confined to Ku Klux Klan rallies or meetings of the John Birch Society are, in 2023, a regular part of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the highest-rated primetime show on Fox News. Not trusting — and, indeed, criminalizing — teachers who draw from 1619's treasure trove of educational materials is a gross disservice to students and adds to the list of demerits for which our state appears a national embarrassment.
Teaching the controversy — regarding the case for reparations, for instance — does not mean giving up on the dream of the United States as a beacon of liberty and opportunity. It means, as Hannah-Jones indefatigably argues, striving to "live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded." It means acknowledging that, again in her words, "the very people who were never supposed to be a part of our democracy have played the most pivotal role in creating it."
In episode one, Hannah-Jones interviewed MacArthur Cotton, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who was arrested in 1963 for refusing to leave the Alabama courthouse after being denied the right to vote.
In state prison, they handcuffed him to bars above his head so his feet barely touched the ground, keeping him in what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would no doubt call a "stress position." They left the prisoner to shit and piss himself, nearly to death.
With the gravity of that historical context in mind, how silly is to to obsess over hiring a few more minorities than white politicians feel comfortable with?
Abbott's purported "Texas of Tomorrow" sounds an awful lot like the Texas of the past — one that true patriots, on this Black History Month, should recommit themselves to leaving in the dustbin of history.
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