NAACP & LULAC Accuse Texas Board of Education of Seeking to Implement "Racially or Ethnically Offensive" & Historically Inaccurate Curriculum

Texas Board of Education accused of trying to implement "racially or ethnically offensive," as well as historically inaccurate curriculum minimizing slavery.

Surprise, surprise. Texas is in the news again over school text books. According to the Houston Chronicle, the NAACP and the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC, are crying foul over a school curriculum teaching children about violent Black Panthers while playing down Ku Klux Klan violence against blacks is not only inaccurate but discriminatory. Both groups have filed a joint complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education.

The complaint asks the department's Office of Civil Rights to review Texas' new social studies curriculum standards approved by the State Board of Education and to take legal action if the state tries to implement the standards the groups call "racially or ethnically offensive," as well as historically inaccurate.

The new standards also balance the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and attempt to point out positive aspects of slavery."It is our contention that the SBOE curriculum changes were made with the intention to discriminate, and the SBOE curriculum and other areas raised in this complaint were either the result of unnecessary policies that have a disparate or stigmatizing impact on African Americans and Latinos, or reflect disparate treatment or neglect," according to the complaint by Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Joey Cardenas Jr., state director for the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens.

A review of the new social studies curriculum standards by historians and college professors indicates that 83 percent of the required historical figures and notable persons for students to study are white. Only 16 percent are African American or Latino. Source: Houston Chronicle

Yeah, talk about the mis-education of black and Latino youths. Sorry, but for anyone to downplay slavery and the impact the Ku Klux Klan had on blacks in America is a disgrace. Take Christopher Columbus, for example. All through high school in Jamaica it was taught to us that he discovered the New World. Really? Weren't there already inhabitants on all those islands? Taino Indians? We would have been better served had the text books said Christopher Columbus was the first European on the island. Back to the U.S. We have Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour trying to downplay and shrug off the integration process in his state by saying the "it wasn't so bad." Though he claimed he went to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak but couldn't remember a word of what was said. For whom? Certainly not blacks, who lived in hell in Mississippi for decades. Remember Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the headaches he caused then-presidential candidate Barack Obama for incendiary comments he made about whites? Shouldn't Haley Barbour be held to the same standard for his association with this racist group?