Point Austin: Back to the Color Line

Malcolm X, who spent most of his adult life fighting racial oppression in such places as Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, was occasionally asked if he didn't think racism was a more serious problem in "the South." He would respond, "As long as you're south of Canada, you're in the South." If Malcolm somehow happened to be reincarnated in Texas in late 2010, I suspect he might be moved to remark, "The more things change, the more they remain the same." For much of the last century in Texas politics, it seems that every time we take one short step forward, we follow it with two long steps back.

That was one reaction I had to the recent Texas NAACP and League of United Latin American Citizens complaint to the Office for Civil Rights of the federal Department of Education, which calls into question not just the recent farcical actions of the Texas State Board of Education, but the entire structure of public education in our still very Southern state. I've reported on the complaint in more detail elsewhere in this issue (see "NAACP and LULAC: Texas Education System Violates Federal Law," p.18), and doing so led to thoughts of even larger issues of state politics. Most of the SBOE reporting has noted (accurately) that the board's curriculum changes were both reactionary and absurd. The civil rights organizations add the often overlooked understanding that embedding such nonsense into the common institutional culture is not just inaccurate and foolish, but has reverberating deleterious effects on both white and nonwhite students, who imbibe a distorted image of Texas history and of the historical relationships among ethnic groups in Texas.

As Texas A&M professor Joe Feagin put it in the supporting documentation, "The decision to accent in the curriculum standards positive aspects of slavery and of slaveholding leaders of the secessionist Confederacy like the treasonous Jefferson Davis will likely have a negative impact on all children [emphasis mine] who are taught this distorted and biased approach to one of the more brutal forms of oppression devised by mankind."

This consequence becomes increasingly important when you consider the respective raw numbers of students currently in the public school system (Texas Education Agency figures): 14% are African-American, 49% Hispanic, 33% white, 4% Asian-American and others. That means at least that it's misleading to continue to describe nonwhite students in Texas as the "minority": 67% in all as a "minority" is an arithmetical absurdity. Noting that the same is true (although in lesser percentages) of the overall Texas population, writes Feagin, "In thinking about these racial and ethnic matters, we should use the term 'majority population' accurately to refer to the Texas majority that is now African-, Hispanic-, and Asian-American."

Setting the Standards

Just as the SBOE remains two-thirds white, the ethnic breakdown of public school teachers (66% white) is essentially the reverse of the students they teach. Does that mean white teachers can't effectively instruct nonwhite students? Absolutely not – unless the state administration has mandated they must miseducate those students on the nature and events of Texas history and social relations, absolve slave owners and traitors, sidestep lynching and racial violence, and convert the historical gains of civil rights activism into the bland benevolence of white rulers.

Speaking of bland benevolence, we will soon see the reigning white majority at the Legislature straining to repeat the prestidigitation it accomplished in the last round of state re-redistricting: ensuring state and congressional control by (white) Republican majorities at the expense of (majority nonwhite) Texas residents. The process will of course be commonly reported as simply the reflection of the victory of Republican voters over Democrats. Unfortunately, as happened the last time, the process cannot be accomplished without effectively disenfranchising African-American and Hispanic voters all over the state, because they will be "cracked and packed" into state and congressional districts in such a way as to make it impossible for them to elect candidates (brown, black, or white) of their own choosing.

Rules of the Game

Asked about the legislative prospects for minority (read: "majority") Texans, Gary Bledsoe of the Texas State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Joey Cardenas of LULAC (who together submitted the complaint to the U.S. Department of Education) tried to be cautiously optimistic, although the strain was showing. "Our plan is to take the high road," Bledsoe told me via e-mail, "because our issues are steeped in humanity, and so we are hoping to reach the good that all people have – though it is harder to reach it in some than in others. ... Dr. Feagin's point about treating the majority fairly is clearly understood in this context. At some point there will be an electoral change that will impact the Legislature as well. It is our intention to push for an all-inclusive Texas."

Cardenas made similar points about reaching out to all people but bluntly noted that bills have already been filed that would require public schools to confirm the citizenship status of all students and to repeal the Texas "DREAM" Act, which enables some undocumented students to pay in-state tuition in state universities. "If we lose at the Legislature," Cardenas said, "we hope that the courts will vindicate us and give us a level playing field."

The big battle of course will be over state and congressional redistricting, and it remains essentially certain that the Republicans will do everything possible to further enhance their hold on the Legislature and the congressional delegation. Unfortunately for that project, according to Census projections, the greatest gains in Texas population have been among Hispanics (33%) and African-Americans (16.2%); in principle, that should mean additional voter "opportunity districts" for those populations. In practice, because of historical voting patterns, the only way the GOP can increase its control is by undermining the voting strength of Hispanics and African-Americans.

We have seen this plenty of times before in Texas, of course, under both "Democrats" and "Republicans," depending on the party fashions of the moment. In March 2006, at the height of the re-redistricting federal court fight, I remarked upon "the extraordinary, institutional, and largely unacknowledged lengths to which white folks will go to maintain political power over people of color, lo these many years." Several years later, the more things change ... so it still goes in Texas: "Anybody who's lived here more than 10 minutes should know that the problem of the 21st century, as of the 20th, remains the color line."