History Is Bunk

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

A few highlights:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

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Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

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There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

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Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

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Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

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Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

It’s just mind-boggling. The erasing, demonizing, and/or minimizing of people of color in this far-right version of United States history is par for the course, frankly. Heaven forbid conservative white men don’t get their due credit for ending racism. But now they also want to vanish a white-dude major political figure in United States history because he coined a phrase inconsistent with their political worldview? In what sort of deluded, made-up, historical world can one argue that the primary author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t help inspire the American Revolution?

People Act Like This Is Surprising?

This isn’t much of a surprise at all, but since Boston has been on my radar of places that I may live one year from now, I took notice. It’s not like 1989 was that long ago. And as you surely remember, there was that thing over a black professor and white cop there recently.

(Yes, I know that if I chose my new home based on lack of racist asshats, I might as well plan on moving to Jupiter, but I can hope, right?)

Diary of Boston Cop Hints at Deep Racism

The legacy of the Boston Police Department’s ugly racial past is playing out behind closed doors and under seal in federal court as lawyers battle over an explosive diary written by a former head of the homicide division.

Retired Lt. Detective John Daley – who led homicide from 1985 to 1989 – scribbled his personal thoughts on murder cases and professional life within the department in the 1980s in a diary that includes sharp critiques of black officers and the black community, according to brief excerpts contained in court papers.

According to the records, filed in the Shawn Drumgold federal civil rights case, Daley wrote that the department was “getting the bottom of the barrel” as it recruited black cops in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He called the removal of two white homicide detectives involved in the controversial Drumgold investigation a “sacrifice to the black community.”

“I’m not interested in talking about it,” Daley said when asked for comment outside his Marshfield home yesterday afternoon.

Of course you’re not interested in talking about it. It’s because all the other racists have moved on to, um, subtle racism.

Let’s Make Fun of Black Women’s Hair for A Buck.

I’m catching up on my Google Reader today, and I see Melissa has another Assvertising post up about this gem of an ad:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJirDEII2Sc[/youtube]

Yep, that’s pretty much nothing but fail. No questions there. Then, I start reading the comments (I have avoided just about every comment section on every blog on the web for the last several months, so this is big thing for me) and see a link that Scott Madin has posted to the Sociological Images blog, which has yet another really messed up KGB ad:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_54smbVC3JQ[/youtube]

Um, excuse me? Is this company for real? Did I just watch a commercial asserting that black women getting weaves don’t know what “natural” means, and of course, when they find out what it does mean, it means animalistic hair?

I don’t even have words for this. Regardless of your thoughts on weaves, you have to admit that this shit is foul.

**There is also, of course, the issue of Chris Rock’s movie, the lead-in to the offensive ad in question in the above linked post, which should be taken into consideration here. I’m not convinced that Chris Rock isn’t doing anything other than what the commercial is doing as well. That will be the subject of another post.

***On a completely unrelated note: Why would anyone use this service anyway? Why would anyone pay to find information that is freely available all over the internet (and judging from the commercials, you’d get bad information anyway)? From the handful of ads that I could stomach, everyone is using a smartphone, an iPhone or Blackberry, both which should have internet access. It’s clear which demographic they are aiming for. So the “away from the computer” argument just doesn’t hold. Who would pay someone a buck a pop for information that they can get for free as part of their phone plan? So yeah, the combination of the really offensive nature of these ads with the audience that they seem to be going for…is just odd.