Editorial: Don’t mess with history, Texas: Textbook revisions whitewash U.S. history

On Monday, 37 members of the South Carolina Senate voted to remove the Confederate flag from its capital, a landmark act in acknowledging that our history is scarred with racism and brutality.

But next month, Texas seeks to re-hoist the controversial emblem — symbolically, at least.

This August, the Lone Star State will roll out a new set of social studies textbooks that whitewash slavery’s role in the rural south, specifically during the Civil War era. This is a grave decision with serious repercussions for our youth. Since Texas is the second-largest textbook buyer in the U.S. after California, purchasing about 48 million texts per year, national publishers will cater to its standards.

And by catering to those skewed standards, we are distorting history.

The Texas Board of Education is introducing these textbooks as a result of a 2010 decision to revise its social studies curriculum. A board of conservative members sought to put politics before education in an effort to balance academia.

Don McLeroy, leader of the conservative faction of the board told The New York Times in 2010 that the board was “adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

In this effort to supposedly “rebalance” academia, the Board is misconstruing history. Using euphemisms to downplay slavery’s role in our history, the texts rename the slave trade the “Atlantic triangular trade.”

Even worse, though, the Washington Post reports that the textbooks frame the causes for the Civil War as “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery,” in that deliberate order.

Since when has the Civil War been more involved in states’ rights than slavery? Why is slavery being treated as a side issue in a war that was completely immersed in black-white relations?

It’s simple — slavery is too controversial. It’s pathetic that the Texas Board of Education feels the facts of American history are too contentious to be taught in schools.

In light of heated race relations, it’s critical that we teach children the history of our country — no matter how ugly. In order for students to understand the context of racism today, we need to portray our past frankly.

It’s our duty to put the politics to rest and correctly portray history — honestly.