Free The Whites of their Eyes by Matt Braun Page A

Organization of American Historians passed aresolution urging the Texas School Board to reconsider its proposed amendments to the state’s social studies curriculum and instead “adopt a history curriculum that reflects the understanding of history developed by the historians and history teachers of Texas.” 13 Similar statements were issued by, among other organizations, the National Council for History Education. 14 These resolutions, though, were hardly likely to exert an influence, given the views board members held about the historical profession. The day the Organization of American Historians released that statement,the governor of Arizona signed into law a bill prohibiting the state’s public schools from offering courses in ethnic studies. The new bill was targeted at a Mexican American studies program in the Tucson school district that, according to the Associated Press, was believed by the state’s head of public education to teach “Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.” 15
    When the Texas School Board convened on May 18, its meeting opened with remarks by Cynthia Dunbar, a Republican member of the board with a degree from Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law and who was, at the time, a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, an evangelical school in Virginia. Dunbar prayed,
    I believe that no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have, from the beginning, been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or the Charter of New England, or the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present—a Christian land, governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of theBible, and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition; the dignity of the individual; the sanctity of the home; equal justice under law; and the reservations of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country. All this I pray, in the name of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. 16
    Why bother fighting over school prayer when you can teach evangelical Christianity in history class? For Dunbar, who leapt from the New Testament to the New World and then collapsed the nearly two centuries separating Virginia’s royal charter and the Bill of Rights, as if James I were the same man as James Madison, history
was
religion.
    All week, while public hearings were held in Austin about the set of history standards known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (or TEKS), the Tea Party was in the news. On Tuesday, Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son, won a Kentucky primary for a U.S. Senate seat, running as a member of the Tea Party. When the Texas School Board met in Austin on Wednesday, the Texas NAACP held a protest rally outside, called “Don’t White-Out Our History.” Inside, Benjamin Jealous, national president of the NAACP, said, “We wake up every morning, and try to push our country forward, not trying tokeep it from running backwards. And this, my mom, reading through these TEKS with me, a very well-educated woman, says, ‘This is taking us in a direction toward the way I was taught in the 1940s.’ ” 17 That night, on MSNBC, Rand Paul talked about his reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Rachel Maddow asked him, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?” Paul hemmed and hawed. 18
    The Texas School Board was scheduled to vote on Friday. That morning, I went to a public school in my neighborhood to visit a third-grade classroom, where the kids, including one of mine, were studying the Revolution.
    Jocelyn Marshall handed out folders to each of six