Don McLeroy Is (A Little Bit) Right

I’m disturbed by the Texas Board of Education’s recent revisions to their state educational standards for the Social Studies curriculum, but not just because of what (now former) Bible-thumping board member Don McLeroy wants.

According to McLeroy’s proposed changes, which will be voted on this month, everyone who ever did anything important was white, Christianity-hating secular genius Thomas Jefferson wasn’t really one of the Founding Fathers, separation of Church and State is a myth, and hip-hop has no cultural significance but country music does. I’m not making this up. McLeroy thinks someone needs to “stand up to the experts”. That is an actual quote.

This revisionist chicken-shit, and the fact that they actually might be getting away with it, is laughable, pathetic, and terrifying. However, others have already discussed it (see heah for example). I have other concerns, which seem to be largely lost in the scramble to slam McLeroy for his historical spin-doctoring.

In addition to these omissions, McLeroy and his supporters want some additions. These include discussing the Black Panthers alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Jefferson Davis alongside Abraham Lincoln, and the Venona project alongside McCarthy. They also advocate discussing the 2nd Amendment, and suggesting that conservative groups like the NRA and the Moral Majority has an important impact on the course of American history.

Watching left-leaning coverage (for example, AronRa’s YouTube video linked above), these additions are simply stated without commentary, as though it should be self-evident that they should not be discussed.

Well, why the fuck not?

The Black Panthers did exist, they were militant, and they did have an important and largely negative impact on how many Americans viewed the civil rights movement…in addition to unifying black communities and being the victims of a vicious counter-intelligence movement by the FBI. They do not provide a single easy and unambiguous moral lesson favoring either liberal or conservative agendas. Jerry Falwell was a loathsome, willfully ignorant douchebag, but it can’t be denied that he had an important influence on American politics and society, as have other conservative movements. The 2nd Amendment was the SECOND AMENDMENT, as in, it came right after the first, and before the third and fourth. The Founding Fathers clearly thought it was important, and the fact that it is unpopular today with a large chunk of the American population is reason to talk about it, not marginalize it.

This isn't quite like the attempts of the Texas School Board to work Intelligent Design into the biology curriculum, or to propose discussing "problems" with evolution which are based on a grotesque misrepresentation of how science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular, actually work. The things listed above are subjects of actual historical relevance.

Both sides betray themselves, not in what they want included and not removed, but in what they want removed and not put in. Just as the particular omissions of McLeroy’s board are dripping with racism (or at least white defensiveness) and religious insecurity, so does automatic opposition to many of his particular additions reveal liberal insecurity with the idea that non-whites or leftists might have ever done anything questionable, or that conservative movements might have actually have had an important place in American history.

Does McLeroy want these subjects taught honestly and objectively in American history classrooms? Will his preferred treatment of the Panthers get far beyond “they were scary black people with guns?” Of course not, are you fucking kidding? However, I don’t hear his many of his critics asking that these subjects be given fair and even-handed treatment, just talking as though it is a crime against reason that they are being discussed at all, and that is bullshit.

Why the automatic snide giggling at the suggestion that real individuals organizations of interest to a substantial chunk of the American population should actually be discussed in classrooms? Why the knee-jerk outrage at suggesting that there were equivocations, complications, and moral ambiguities to the civil rights movement, or any other subject in the history of this extraordinary, weird, and fucked-up country?

Like it or not, McLeroy’s claim of liberal bias has merit. Even though unequivocally slamming everything he has pushed for is easier (and more satisfying), effort should be made to extract the valid points against left-wing bias from the rest of his agenda.