Placido Salazar psalazar9@satx.rr.com PROPOSED BILLS WOULD BAN CHICANA/O HISTORY: Texas: The state of [intellectual] exception?

Texas Republicans launch their version of forbidden curriculum

I guess Christian? Conservative racist republicans in Texas, as in Arizona, are afraid that our school children will find out from history books, that: #1: their heroes, Stephen Austin, James Bowie and other TRAITORS renounced their American citizenship and became Catholic MEXICAN CITIZENS, in exchange for land. #2: They want to white-wash several hundred years of Mexican, Black and Oriental culture and history from the Southwest to mislead students into believing that Texas History started in 1836 after the defeat at the Alamo, which did not belong to them, in the first place. We have actually been fighting these racist fanatics on this front at the Texas State Board of Education for several years, but I guess they became braver, with the outcome of the Arizona racist Jan Brewja administration and XENOPHOBIC Tucson school officials. The people of Arizona should fight this discriminatory tactic tooth and nail. As Mexican-Americans, we have consistently proven that we are just as, if not more American Patriots than some of these draft-dodging bigots. PARENTS NEED TO GET INVOLVED AND FIGHT FOR THE EDUCATION OF THEIR CHILDREN. WE are not getting any younger, so they need to pick up the torch and keep fighting for our American rights. We cannot allow a handful of dictatorial racist individuals decide on the INDOCTRINATION rather than the EDUCATION of our future generations, regardless of ethnicity. We must not allow America to become another Russia or China.. but THAT WILL HAPPEN, if American parents do not step up to the plate, beginning with School Board/ PTA meetings and VOTE, to vote extremist politicians and those who do not fight for us, out of office. You must LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!!!

There are those who MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, THOSE WHO WISH THINGS WOULD HAPPEN AND THOSE WHO SUDDENLY WAKE UP AND WONDER WHAT HAPPENED? EVIL can only triumph, if GOOD PEOPLE REMAIN PASSIVE. WAKE UP, AMERICA. Placido Salazar, USAF Retired PROUD MEXICAN-AMERICAN Vietnam Veteran Bronze Star for Valor and Purple Heart Recipient From: Dorinda Moreno [mailto:pueblosenmovimientonorte@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2013 5:36 AM To: Latinosineducation; C4IR; ITCPM/PPT; Action; juntos_sf@yahoogroups.com; isn@lists.riseup.net; tupocc@yahoogroups.com Subject: PROPOSED BILLS WOULD BAN CHICANA/O HISTORY: Texas: The state of [intellectual] exception? Texas Republicans launch their version of forbidden curriculum

Please excuse duplicates.

Devon Pea

Mar 18

Colleagues: Here is my first report on the latest attack on Ethnic Studies. This time it is happening in Texas and involves efforts to more slyly reform the core courses in -Devon G. Pea, Ph.D. "Memory is a moral obligation, all the time." -J. Derrida

Texas: The state of [intellectual] exception?

Image courtesy of No Tx SB 1128

Texas Republicans launch their version of forbidden curriculum

PROPOSED BILLS WOULD BAN CHICANA/O HISTORY Devon G. Pea | Seattle, WA | March 18, 2013
In an apparent move to initiate an attack on Ethnic Studies and more specifically Chicana/o and African American Studies Republican state legislators are introducing new legislation to modify the list of courses that would count as core credit history requirements at Texas state universities and colleges. The attack comes in the form of Senate Bill 1128 introduced by Sen. Dan Patrick and House Bill 1838 by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione. I first heard of these bills through a Facebook contact and colleague involved with a new organization working against passage of the proposed legislation. The group calls itself No TX SB1128 and just started a website at http://www.notxsb1128.org/. The legislation seems less overtly racist and repressive compared to the nefarious law passed in Arizona in 2010 and known as HB2281. That law has been challenged and is on appeal before the 9th Circuit federal court in San Francisco. The Texas legislation is a mere 300 words long and reads as follows: A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT relating to curriculum requirements in American and Texas history at institutions of higher education. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS: SECTION 1. Section 51.302(b), Education Code, is amended to

read as follows: (b) Except as provided by Subsection (c), a college or university receiving state support or state aid from public funds may not grant a baccalaureate degree or a lesser degree or academic certificate to any person unless the person has credit for six semester hours or its equivalent from courses providing a comprehensive survey of [in] American History. A student is entitled to submit as much as three semester hours of credit or its equivalent from courses providing a comprehensive survey of [in] Texas History in partial satisfaction of this requirement. The college or university may determine that a student has satisfied this requirement in whole or part on the basis of credit granted to the student by the college or university for a substantially equivalent survey course completed at another accredited college or university, or on the basis of the student's successful completion of an advanced standing examination administered on the conditions and under the circumstances common for the college or university's advanced standing examinations. The college or university may grant as much as three semester hours of credit or its equivalent toward satisfaction of this requirement for substantially equivalent work completed by a student in the program of an approved senior R.O.T.C. unit. SECTION 2. The changes in law made by this Act apply only to the curriculum requirements established for a degree or certificate program offered by an institution of higher education beginning with undergraduate students who initially enroll in the institution for the 2014 fall semester. SECTION 3. This Act takes effect September 1, 2013. To keep track of the legislation, my readers and followers can track developments at a website for the Texas 83rd Legislature. That sounds innocuous enough but the key words here that apparently have so many Texas college and university professors concerned is the phrase comprehensive survey. This could be interpreted to mean that courses focusing on the experiences of particular racial and ethnic groups are not comprehensive enough to be counted as part of the core requirements. The irony, of course, is that when the Euro-American experience is normalized to be the comprehensive experience, that results in the privileging of the narrow views and experiences of a specific ethnic and racial group (whites) whose experiences are misrepresented as the one true measure of the history of the nation or the state. I guess the white male legislators didnt think of that. According to a March 17 report appearing in the San Antonio Express-News, members of the Houston-based Librotraficantes movement went to the state Capitol last week to lodge their concerns. Those concerns should spur other watchdog groups to oppose the bill. Tony Daz, a founder of Librotraficantes the name translates as book traffickers has traveled to Arizona in a political protest action designed to illustrate the absurdity of these bans on the teaching of

what is widely, indeed globally, considered a legitimate and respected field of scholarly inquiry. Daz is known for smuggling banned books into Arizona. The report in the Express-News by Elaine Ayala included interviews with my colleagues Gilberto Hinojosa of the University of the Incarnate Word, Emilio Zamora at UT-Austin, and Carey Latimore of Trinity University. They told Ayala that the legislation seems to have come about as a conscious response to a recent study [sic] by the New York-based National Association of Scholars of history departments at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. NAS is a notorious academic watchdog consisting of conservative academics. Ayala notes that, NAS purports to be devoted to neutral, unbiased scholarship and maintaining and lifting standards, but theirs seem more an attempt to revert to a time when race and gender studies werent part of the academy. Consider the title of the NAS study, Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?. Actually, NAS is known as a reactionary and censorious group that routinely blacklists academics and classes it considers as guilty of liberal bias or of being too left-leaning. For an organization that purports to defend academic freedom, the organization spends most of its efforts trying to censor faculty and classes it disagrees with. The latest attack on Ethnic Studies comes in a more carefully veiled attempt and lacks the blatantly telluric partisan language of Arizonas HB2281, which accused Ethnic Studies teachers in that state of preaching the overthrow of the U.S. government, fomenting racial resentment, and other wildly inaccurate and untrue claims. Ironically, the last time I checked, it was Tea Party Republicans in Texas, Arizona, and other red states calling for the overthrow of the Obama Administration and secession among other niceties. Ayalas report notes that Senator Patrick is an evangelical Christian best known for backing the sonogram law and introducing anti-immigration legislation. His background and previous legislative actions reveal what this is really about. In part it certainly is a continuation of the Texas State Board of Education battles, in which some Mexican American contributions were removed from textbooks as Ayalas report states. But this is also an act of desperate fear by those who are afraid of the looming and inevitable demographic transition that will make Texas, like most other border states, a Mexican majority population. This is yet another example of the ecology of fear that I have been writing about for four years on this blog. It is also another example of the state of exception provoked by the fearful soon-to- be-a-minority white politicians. These fearful right-wing politicos are trying to suspend the rule of law in this case by passing legislation that undermines academic freedom for Chicana/os and African Americans among other ethnic groups. It also undermines the principle of faculty self-governance and opens a troubling pattern for micro-management of the curriculum by politicians lacking even the most rudimentary understanding of the standards all social science publications and curriculum are held to, including, perhaps especially, those dealing with history. My readers and followers can be sure that I will be following developments in this important battle very closely in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I urge concerned colleagues to visit the home page of the organization, No TX SB1128 at

http://www.notxsb1128.org/. Write letters supporting the group and the principles of free speech, academic freedom, and equal protection. Posted by Devon G. Pea Labels: censorship Texas education wars Texas education history curriculum forbidden curriculum Ethnic Studies SB 1128 State of exception Emilio Zamora academic freedom HB 1838 Gilberto Hinojosa --