October 9, 2015 5:43 PM

KR: A more productive Texas textbook debate

After the justified furor over slaves being referred to as "workers," Education Reporter Kimberly Reeves asks what a productive dialogue about textbooks would look like

Facts have a way of getting lost in a good narrative, and the case of the “African workers” in Texas textbooks is a perfect example.

The idea that slavery would be described in any textbook as some kind of “workers program” is mindboggling. Almost 2 million people who viewed mom Roni Dean-Burren’s viral video probably would agree. The video received swift condemnation in the social media sphere this past weekend.

“What do we call the Jews that were sent to Auschwitz, then? Campers?!?!?” went one post on Twitter. And Dean-Burren herself told Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show on Comedy Central that this was a willful attempt to reframe history.

“Do you think there’s some kind of soft-selling of some of the bad parts of American history, to make kids feel better?” Wilmore asked Dean-Burren last night. “What’s going on there?”

“I absolutely believe that,” Dean-Burren said. “I believe that we want to tell these stories, and we want to soften them. It’s almost like we want to write history with a pencil, instead of a bleeding pen. And we can’t do that.”

The convenient narrative of this story would be that a conservative and crazy State Board of Education in Texas pushing through a revisionist history of slavery, and that the textbook industry was a willing and compliant partner, all in the name of picking up a few more Texas textbook dollars.

If that’s the case, then a whole bunch of us back in Texas need to be held accountable for not throwing a flag on this textbook issue, either at the point when the social studies standards were created or when the textbooks were approved. Arguably, these social studies were, by any estimate, the most scrutinized in the country.

But the fact is, no one raised the issue. Nor does it appear anyone approached our education commissioner, who as an African-American would be keenly concerned with that portrayal in textbooks. It even got past school districts that picked this particular world geography textbook off a list of approved materials.

So what went wrong?

By Kimberly Reeves