Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” — Thomas Jefferson
If we had listened to the law-and-order crowd two and a half centuries ago, it’s doubtful we would have become an independent nation.
Americans, then as now, can be an unruly lot. And the build-up to the Revolutionary War, which included rioting, arson and general mayhem, make last year’s No Kings marches look like placid knitting circles. Send today’s apologists for ICE back in time, and they’d likely be arguing that British atrocities were not atrocities at all, but wholly justified reactions to a sinister domestic terror threat.
Ken Burns’ latest PBS documentary, The American Revolution, sent the point home. Nine years in the making, the six-part series prides itself on offering a less-than-rosy account of a guerrilla insurgency.
“The Loyalists are essentially the conservatives,” Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, explains early on. “They don’t like mobs. They don’t see King George III as a tyrant.”
“We’ve forgotten much of the street warfare, of the anarchy, of the provocations that took place,” biographer Stacy Schiff remarks in kind. “Part of our revolution, I think, we have largely sanitized.”
Notwithstanding the recent defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, every episode is currently available to stream online.
Right-wing critics wasted no time in flagging the program as “a woke mockery of America’s founding,” to quote a headline run by the New York Post. One hopes that merely highlighting the noble sacrifices of Native American and Black volunteers would not of itself be enough to draw the ire of Christian nationalists and their coddlers.
Another incessantly “anti-woke” pundit, to his credit, took a different tack.
“The documentary teaches us that the American militia facing the British around Boston in 1775 was the most integrated one in this country until after World War II. Nearly one in 10 of the soldiers at Valley Forge were Black,” linguist John McWhorter wrote in a review for the New York Times. “Burns regularly reminds us of the contradiction between the founders’ insistence on their liberty and their comfort in keeping Black people in bondage. But anyone who concludes that he does it to shame the nation or perform his own moral superiority came in spoiling to see it that way.”
Ironically or predictably, this same message — the glaring contradiction between highfalutin egalitarian ideals and the institution of slavery — was omitted from the life of Thomas Jefferson in the content advisors’ recommendations to the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) for its massive revamp of the social studies curriculum that’s currently unfolding.
Asked by District 4 Boardmember Staci Childs at the Jan. 28 meeting whether kindergarten-through-8th grade students would chiefly learn about Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, Andrea Hutchison, a curricular coordinator with extensive classroom experience, replied that the panel decided to gloss over his ownership of other human beings.
”One of the many drafts I wrote was about the juxtaposition of him being a slave owner and writing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” she said. “We didn’t go with that draft.”
Upon Childs’ request, Hutchison promised to “relook at and address” that lesson plan for 5th graders. Fingers crossed that such essential knowledge manages to make the cut in the new Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards for public educators.
Imbibers of Burns’ “woke Kool-Aid” will already know that dozens of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s slaves escaped during the war to join the ranks of the British army on the promise of their postbellum emancipation. Many stayed free after the end of hostilities by fleeing the country, even as Washington and Jefferson tried to hunt them down and reclaim their so-called property.
What percentage of U.S. high school grads would you estimate know that fact today?
Despite the alleged reign of the “woke-ocracy” over all facets of education, how many students could recount the events of Sullivan’s Expedition, also detailed in Burns’ film? This was a scorched-earth assault in 1779 against the Native American Seneca nation, and Washington’s orders, voiced with gravitas by actor Josh Brolin, were unambiguous.
“The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more,” Washginton wrote to Major Gen. John Sullivan. “You will not by any means listen to any overture for peace before the total ruin of their settlements is affected.”
By campaign’s end, some 40 prosperous villages were leveled by fire, re-earning Washington his Iroquois nickname, “Town Destroyer.”
“One of the foundational truths of American history is that this is a nation built on Indian land, and Washington would not dispute that, I think, for a minute,” Dartmouth College historian Colin Calloway states in Episode 4.
Who would dispute that? Well, although Washington was perhaps the nation’s wealthiest landowner at the time, the world’s richest man today, soon-to-be trillionaire Elon Musk, would surely beg to differ. Musk is on record suggesting that simply teaching that the U.S. is built on stolen land “should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned.”
And yet, Kate Rogers remains a free woman. The former president of Alamo Trust was compelled to resign her stewardship of the San Antonio historical site last year after a right-wing backlash to a tweet officially honoring — gasp! — “indigenous peoples.” A subsequent rooting around in Rogers’ doctoral dissertation raised the exceptionalist eyebrows of Texas GOP officials and led to her removal.
In a conversation with Texas Public Radio last month, Rogers likened her situation to the McCarthy era.
“If you get labelled as ‘woke,’ that means you need to be banished. And there are people out there, like [Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham], who are just looking. And there is a list — I know for a fact there’s a list — of people that they’re after for being ‘woke,'” Rogers stated. “Anyone out there — whether you’re in public radio, a public university, the public sector in any way — should be very concerned that an elected official could go find something that you wrote, however long ago, and use that as a weapon to label you a certain way and call for your termination. These are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about.”
Rogers has since sued Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and his cronies for violating her First Amendment rights.
Despite all that, Rogers also still sits on the content advisory panel for Texas’ new social studies curriculum as a valued expert.
“As it relates to the TEKS,” she told TPR, “whatever comes out of the process, those standards would go into effect and be written into the curriculum and textbooks in 2030. Maybe it takes another decade to make any significant changes after that. So you’re talking about a very long tail to the changes that are underway now.”
To her point, 2040 is a while to wait before we can fix the mistakes of the past.
Fellow content advisor, Yolanda Leyva, director of the Institute of Oral History at the University of El Paso, lamented at the Jan. 28 meeting that the advisors had dropped 54 pages of fact-heavy guidance on the working groups who are now charged with writing up required expectations.
“It’s going to set up teachers to fail, and it’s going to set up students to fail as well. It’s just too much,” she said. “I think this is being rushed too much, and it’s something that’s going to affect Texas students for many years to come.”
And Leyva’s not alone in raising the alarm. The American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest and largest membership group for historians isn’t usually given to strident rhetoric. Yet, last September, the organization alleged the radical changes afoot in Texas’ social studies curriculum had been “promoted aggressively by the overtly ideological Texas Public Policy Foundation,” scrapping “research-tested practices and familiar courses in favor of an unbalanced approach” beholden to “American exceptionalism.”
Even Donald Frazier, director of the Texas Center at Schreiner University in Kerrville, who typically excels at putting lipstick on the pig of this Byzantine backroom process, was circumspect.
“What stood out to me was this was a pretty comprehensive overhaul … . And I think we’re living in times now that point out the consequences of not taking social studies seriously,” he said.
To his point, recent SBOE meetings — although creative fodder for at-home drinking games — echo some of the chaos-stoking ignorance we have been forced to bear witness to across the country of late. Twice during time allotted for public comments, for example, a board member tried to silence a Muslim speaker by arguing she was part of a foreign terrorist network — as per Gov. Greg Abbott’s crusade against the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an anti-discrimination advocacy group.
So much for Texas’ ethic of welcome and gallantry.
The proceedings haven’t been entirely bleak though. On Jan. 29, the board voted 8 to 5 to expand the description of slavery recommended for 2nd graders, over the objections of those who complained the topic was “too heavy” for kids that age and that “white Europeans were enslaved as indentured servants” too — a racist myth.
The sparse original text read: “Slavery denied liberty and was the main cause of the Civil War.”
“I understand how precious our children are, and how they should be protected, but ‘slavery denied liberty’ is almost insulting to the descendants of people who had to endure this,” Boardmember Childs explained as she proposed amended language that elaborated on just how horrific slavery was for those whose liberty was denied.
The majority of the SBOE, lopsidedly composed of 10 Republicans and just five Democrats, agreed with her. It was a small but fitting victory in a building named after Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman elected to the Texas Senate, circa 1966.
“Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual,” Thomas Paine would write 190 years prior to rouse beaten-down patriots to action in his epoch-defining pamphlet “Common Sense,” a document cited over and over in Ken Burns’ history.
Perhaps, facing the onslaught of the forces of Reaction from the committee rooms of Austin to the unforgiving streets of Minneapolis, it’s time for us, in the words of the late Civil Rights icon John Lewis, “to make a little noise.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
