Euphemisms for Slavery

Hundred of years of employment opportunities:

Involuntary relocation.

That’s one of the euphemisms a group of educators in Texas came up with as part of the curriculum that would introduce the transatlantic slave trade to second-graders.

Now, fortunately the Texas State Board of Education rejected “involuntary relocation” — which sounds more like what happens when your car gets towed, not centuries of government-sanctioned kidnappings. But the fact remains that these educators are tasked with finding a way to make slavery sound less slavery-ish.

...Then again, Texas is where a ninth-grade social studies textbook rebranded the enslaved as immigrant workers, in a caption that read: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” Because slavery wasn’t an inhumane institution; it was hundreds of years of employment opportunities in a foreign country.

...Take Gov. Greg Abbott for instance. He’ll be 65 in November — born in 1957 and educated in Texas. The Dallas Morning News used to publish a little comic strip called Texas History Movies, which began in 1926. As the title suggests, the strip was designed to teach young readers about the state’s beginnings. Teachers from across the state started incorporating the comic strip to supplement their lesson plans. For 30 years it was distributed to students in the state. Among the whitewashing hits: Gen. Gordon Granger freed the slaves in 1865 and “the law provided for the education of Negroes even while they were slaves.”

You can see how “immigrants flocking to the Republic of Texas” got into the classroom. Or why someone like Abbott, who was alive while Texas History Movies was still being sent to classrooms, is not a fan of the 1619 Project.

W. Caleb McDaniel, who won the 2020 Pulitzer for history, said of the full hardback edition of the comic strip: “It contained no mention of the over 200,000 slaves living in Texas at the beginning of the war, and no mention even of emancipation after the war.”

...Pick any era — from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to whatever the hell we’re living through today — and with each turn of history’s page there are countless examples of white people fighting systemic racism. Heroes worthy of honoring and remembering in the history we teach our children.

That’s the history Toth is afraid might be taught.