Do you expect them to root for an even worse town than Dallas? Houston is the armpit of Texas.

The thing I always find fascinating, as a non-TX native living in TX, about TX city rivalries is that people from Houston, San Antonio, etc. talk shit about Dallas all the time, but you rarely hear Dallas people originate the talk the other way. The isn’t, it seems to me, because they respect those cities and think…

The Galveston Hurricane is the greatest and most terrible natural disaster in the history of the US because not only did it destroy Galveston, it essentially jump-started the growth of Houston.

Nothing says cultured like the smell of Houston. It’s like the aroma of a cheese-wheel made from the material that collects between the balls and legs of a sweaty Houstonite. Congratulations on being even fatter than Dallas.

You can hate Dallas all you want but don't fucking lie to people

There’s a reason some of the top cancer research facilities are in Houston. The whole town is a carcinogen.

What was that, Drew? I couldn’t hear you over mouthfuls of Pecan Lodge barbecue.

Even having backed it up on Matty Stafford, you still rooted for the Boys in the wild card game?

Keep telling yourself that. It’s adorable. *patpatpat*

DALLAS RULES EVERYONE ELSE SUXXXXXXXXX

I went to public high school in Texas and we never learned creationism. I think the issue with this particular portion of your education is the “Christian” part, not the “Texas” part.

I don’t read the bit about their skills as being a positive thing about slavery. I read it as a “why”, as in bringing them here had a cost and this is why people were willing to buy them, as opposed to the indentured servants mentioned or rounding up the remaining Native Americans who perhaps didn’t have those skills.

Yeah, James W. Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” criticized the lack of coverage of the black experience in America. You better believe this mix of Africans of different tribes and the use of Christianity as a bonding element absolutely influenced slave culture, and that slave culture influenced African American…

i have nothing to add to this very great post other than the anecdote that one of my “science textbooks” in my TX christian school was literally called when god made the dinosaurs

Agreed. There’s actually a push in some academic circles to not remove agency on the part of the slaves. They were more than just chattel that did what they were told. They had profound religious lives, family, days off, etc. They also contributed greatly to the development of the nation, our society, and out success.

I actually work for HMH (not on SS materials, though). When we’re writing about such sensitive topics in textbooks, it’s a tightwire act, particularly with Texas. It’s bound to come off as clumsy because we hate having to kowtow to their awful prejudices enshrined in their state standards (which are legally binding…

Yeah, that’s how I read it. The acknowledgment that the Southern economy was built on slaves’ knowledge. Not that it wasn’t bad. Even the religion part, I thought, was trying to say that slaves had the ability to create community. As much as people here hate religion, it does show how slaves were able to think about…

I think those clumsy statements about religion and culture can be seen as an attempt to contextualize the roots of African American culture.

A couple of those examples (say, how the slaves brought important knowledge) seem less like attempts at making slavery into a positive thing, and more of a very clumsy attempt to document some kind of... agency or personhood for people who are often only depicted as helpless, faceless, no-impact victims.

This wasn’t a work. Definitely a shoot.