Texas textbooks have been in and out of the news — notoriously — since 2010, when the Lone Star State’s board of education adopted its revised curriculum, which has just recently come into effect in Texas classrooms. These texts have been heavily criticized for whitewashing or rewriting aspects of American history — including most notably the facts and truths about slavery and its role in the Civil War. As Bobby Finger reported in Jezebel last month:

“In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum that … would “put a conservative stamp on history” once going into effect in 2015. In advance of their debut in Texas classrooms last week, it was widely reported that the new textbooks, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson, “whitewashed” slavery by downplaying the brutality of the facts and treating it as a “side issue.” … Their contents demonstrate a troubling creep away from teaching actual history—and the unpleasant truth of America’s legacy of racism—and toward a sanitized fable of historical white morality.”

But it’s not just the facts or even the vocabulary in these schoolbooks that are loaded with inaccuracies and bias or cleansed of harsh truths: it’s the very manner in which these narratives are phrased that has some commentators deeply concerned. Continue reading →