The 1836 Project is Woke

Don't worry, it probably won't last.

You might have heard the hullabaloo about a recommendation to swap out references to “slavery” in Texas’s second-grade state curriculum and textbooks to “involuntary relocation.” The idea, which was proposed by a working group of experts and volunteers advising state board of elected officials, has miles to go before it sleeps. There will be so many meetings, votes and whispered negotiations. Then, at a meeting that started during happy hour and will be dragging toward breakfast, exhausted elected officials will lash out at each other and reach an ill-considered conclusion. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how education policy gets made in Texas. We’ll be lucky if they don’t end up calling slaves “unpaid interns,” or as Fox & Friends Brian Kilmeade did in his childish Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers: The Texas Victory That Changed American History, “servants.”

While the State Board of Education mucks about with to do about slavery, the 1836 Project motors right ahead. Conceived in the wake of the 1619 Project and at least in part as a response to Forget the Alamo, the project attempts to “promote patriotic education.”

“There are concerns that civics education in this state does not sufficiently address the stories and unique history of Texas,” according to an analysis of the bill, which proposes perhaps the most-bizarre way to promote Texas history: giving out a pamphlet to people getting their drivers license, a brochure guaranteed to whitewash slavery from the creation of Texas first as an independent republic and then as a slave-holding state. This pamphlet is sure to be about propaganda in the culture war, not historical literacy.

Folks, someone slipped us a draft of the brochure, titled “Texas, Our Texas.” And let me tell you, it’s not nearly as bad as we feared. In fact, the brochure draft mentions slavery more than Roots. Let’s take a look:

First of all, I did not know that the first European explorer to find Texas was a Spaniard named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, or White Baby Cow Head. If you have a firmer grasp of Latin etymology, keep it to your damn self. Texas was discovered by White Baby Cow Head in the 1520s, and everything that’s happened since then is his fault.

Fast forward to Mexico inviting a bunch of Anglos to settle Texas to provide a buffer with the Comanches. The Anglos, notes the brochure draft, wanted to make money farming cotton, which set up a Sophie’s choice insofar as some of the enslaved workers might have been named Sophie.

The presence of enslaved people among these Americans provided a dilemma for Mexico. Many opposed the institution on moral and philosophical grounds, while others saw it as necessary to develop the region’s agricultural potential. This complication would be a constant source of friction.

This language comes directly from the draft brochure for the 1836 Project and is essentially the theme of Forget the Alamo, the book the 1836 Project was partly established to refute. I pity the mid-level functionary who has to approve this.

The brochure goes on to note the reluctance of the American colonists to abide “by their contractual obligations” to speak Spanish, practice Catholicism, and abide by the Spanish judicial system. “These Americans also believed in ‘inalienable rights’ and were quick to defend them,” notes the draft brochure.

“These Americans may have been Mexicans by law, but intellectually they remained attached to the ideals of the American Revolution. “Honorable and dishonorable alike travel with their political constitution in their pockets,” Mier y Terán wrote, “demanding the privileges authority and officers which such as constitution guarantees.”

Also touched on is how the “the burden would fall unevenly,” quoting the old saying, “Texas is heaven for men and hogs but hell for women and oxen,” to which the draft brochure appended, “This was doubly true for the enslaved.”

There’s a bunch of stuff about how the colonists objected to a change in the constitution without noting that the version they wanted allowed slavery, and the canard that few of “this collection of risk takers” who defended the Alamo “held enslaved people as property” is included in the run up to the siege, but it would be impossible to read the brochure so far and conclude that slavery was unrelated to the conflict. In fact, the draft brochure centers it.

The draft brochure ignores slavery’s omission from Texas’ Declaration of Independence and focuses instead on the Republic’s constitution which was “patterned … after those of North Carolina and Tennessee where slavery was legal.” And after enslavement was baked into the foundation, Texas built. “What had been a diverse borderland became an extension of the American South,” states the draft brochure.

That tees up the Civil War nicely, noting that many Tejanos and Eastern European immigrants opposed the Confederacy. The brochure includes that it took two years after the end of the war to declare in Texas that all slaves were freed, a holiday we now celebrate as Juneteenth. And thanks to “pro-Southern white Texans … defending the concept of states’ rights … Jim Crow laws, legal segregation and ethnic bias against minority groups continued into the new century” including “extralegal executions often at the hands of state officials.”

The presence of racial oppressions such as the White Primary—which effectively barred African Americans from voting—and segregation laws remained vestiges that continued to shadow the Texas identity. Tejano natives and Mexican newcomers alike also faced discrimination.

Holy Urinal Cakes, Batman! The 1836 Project is woke! This is the third version of the brochure. What did they cut out of the second draft? Sam Houston’s drug use? William Travis’ shady legal deal that got him his enslaved aide, Joe? Any mention, by the way, of a single woman? When the legislature passed a law requiring a patriotic teaching of history, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have in mind an honest survey of the role of slavery in the creation of Texas as a country and in the evolution of Texas as a state.

We assumed the 1836 Project was just going to be the academic equivalent of a Soviet show trial, which is why we turned them down. A couple months ago, my Forget the Alamo coauthors and I were invited by the 1836 Project Advisory Committee “to present to the group on your novel.” Bryan and Chris had their own objections to participating. I fixated on the misclassification of our nonfiction book as a novel. If intentional, that’s admirable shade. If not, hoo boy.

In any case, I think I’ll withhold judgment until I see the final version of the brochure. Will they turn slaves into “involuntary migrants” or “servants”? Or will the Texas Education Agency do that most patriotic thing of all, which is let the historians shine a light on it all so we can do the hard work of setting everything to rights. Our job as citizens is not to break our arms patting ourselves on the back but to give each other a helping hand. And a history that shows we haven’t always gotten this right isn’t a condemnation of our character but an invitation to prove that we are who we hope we are.

There is always time to do good. This is our time, and I hope the editors at the Texas Education Agency see the draft brochure not as criticism but as an invitation to show the moral courage to tell Texans the truth.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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