A working group of nine educators including a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that enslavement should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second-grade social studies instruction.

The thing is that enslavement wasn’t involuntary relocation.

Thankfully, the board unanimously directed the work group “to revisit that specific language” because enslavement wasn’t involuntary relocation.

Enslavement on indigenous soil, conducted by Europeans—namely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants—was the kidnapping and removal of African people for the exploitation of their labor, thereby enriching those white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who owned land.

Involuntary relocation is when your elementary school teacher tells you to move your seat because you and your friend are talking too much.

But this doesn’t surprise me. Republicans have leaned into their white nationalism and there are major curriculum changes going on in Florida too, for example. But this is Texas. The history of enslavement and Texas run deep. It’s a history I suspect white nationalists don’t want their children and others learning about.

Yet, they’ll do the dance of speaking about why Juneteenth is so important … Juneteenth is tied to the very racism that made Texas what it is to begin with!

Here is the history I suspect Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and others don’t want children to learn.

Texas was originally indigenous land stolen by the Spanish and made part of New Spain, one of their colonial settlements in the New World. Once their independence was won from Spain, Mexico was the occupier of Texas or Tejas. Yet it was a settlement that had hardly been occupied. Therefore, the Mexican government chose to open occupation of the land to white settlers who enslaved Africans in the 1820s. Mexico allowed the enslavers to enslave despite abolishing enslavement throughout Mexico in 1829.

Funny thing is that Africans didn’t want to be enslaved. Thousands escaped and went deeper into Mexico to secure their freedom. White settlers appealed to the Mexican government to get their “property” returned to them but the Mexican government elected not to return African people to enslavement. The settlers were upset and chose to rebel against the Mexican government.

The Texas Revolution was a battle between whites wanting to freely enslave people and the Mexican government seeking to stamp out a rebellion. Due to other rebellions throughout Mexico, the rebels were able to take advantage and were successful in their secession from Mexico and thus it became its own country.

Once independent of Mexico, the Texans created a law whereby free Black people were banned from entering the state. Until Black Union troops entered Texas to announce Special Order 3, almost every Black person in Texas was enslaved. With all of that, Texas was annexed into the United States in 1845 followed by a few other states taken from Mexico as a result of the Mexican American War of 1846 to 1848.

The long and short of it is that the story of Texas or Tejas is a tale of white settler colonialism. White people took the land of an established nation and used it to enslave Africans. The Thirteenth Amendment ended enslavement but the war’s end secured the taking of all of Northern Mexico.

Gov. Abbott doesn’t want that truth taught in schools. He’d rather students hear the white settler tales of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston liberating Texas from an unfair and unrelenting Mexican government. Meanwhile, neither Austin nor Houston liberated those they enslaved and worked relentlessly to maintain enslavement in Texas.

Austin, the founder of Anglo Texas, led the second colonization of the region by bringing 300 families and their slaves from the U.S. to the Tejas region in 1825. He is considered “The Father of Texas.” Houston was born on a slave plantation, inherited slaves and owned many throughout his life. He was twice president of the Republic of Texas and was one of the first to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate. He thought states should be allowed to decide for themselves on the issue of slavery.

The U.S. history is a history of white settler colonialism. It’s a history of enslaving Africans and murdering first people. Although the language may change, the truth will always remain the same.

Photo: Then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott speaks during an anti-abortion rally in Austin, July 14, 2013 (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Rann Miller is the director of anti-bias and DEI initiatives as well as a high school social studies teacher for a school district located in Southern New Jersey. He’s also a freelance writer and founder of the Urban Education Mixtape, supporting urban educators and parents of students in urban schools. He is the author of the upcoming book, Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids, with an anticipated release date of February 2023. You can follow him on Twitter @UrbanEdDJ .