As the Dallas News observes in this editorial, the state’s textbooks are carefully scrutinized and heatedly debated, with an eye to making southern history as anodyne as possible. I wrote about this last July, quoting a state-by-state study of public school history curricula that said Texas offered “a rigidly thematic and theory-based social studies structure with a politicized distortion of history.”
And so the above slipped through. Maybe it was just a mistake, which is what the publisher, McGraw-Hll, claims, but it has the ring of compromise. I picture some old-fashioned educators arguing that slavery couldn’t be ignored completely. Well, there might have been a slave trade, replied the majority, But let’s not go so far as to say there were slaves. If we call them immigrants and workers we’ll show proper respect for their personhood.
Besides, we southerners like to say the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. It couldn’t have been fought to end slavery once we make it clear there were no slaves.