How Activist Journalists & Historians Fail Us
In my last article about peer review, I mentioned a new activist history organization formed by disgruntled academics who left the Texas State Historical Association rather than defend their OOPS (Only Oppression & Power Studies) approach to history. From their statement of core values, though, we find a fabulously funny statement that’s precisely the opposite of how they reacted when their views were actually challenged:
“We recognize that ‘honest history’ will often confront and counter preconceived notions about the past that may cause discomfort. We will never advocate avoiding such discussion, but instead believe that it is only through meeting such ideas head-on can we collectively find ways to get past issues that divide us and find a way to reach common ground in which we can find solutions that will unite all people.”
Yep. They met those ideas head-on by heading out.
So, anyway, I concluded the last article by saying time will tell what kind of knowledge that group will produce using their journal. With a little help from their friends in the media, we’ve been blessed with a preview and it’s more over-the-top than whatever you’re imagining in your head.
Reporters from Texas Observer and Texas Monthly attended the inaugural OOPSie gathering. San Antonio’s Express News slung some mud and the Washington Post even worked it into an article, years in the making, about the Texas Rangers. The reporting was remarkable, so here I am remarking.
The theme of the coverage is basically this: activist alliance forms to guard the history of the marginalized; TSHA cares only about white history. That’s the dichotomy and it’s what you’re going to hear from here on out, so prepare to counter that narrative with a knowing smile on your face. This coverage is so flawed it’s funny.
If you haven’t read any of these stories but would like to, links to them appear at the bottom of this story. Here’s the highlight reel, beginning with Texas Observer:
It’s not 1950. Diversifying the historical record isn’t under fire. Sloppy and disingenuous historians stone cold drunk on ideology are. And the gang’s all here!
No. Mr. Bryan’s lawsuit didn’t end when Nancy Baker Jones resigned, exactly. The lawsuit ended in mediation, presumably, because Jones’ lawyers told her how the trial would go. I was there when the judge who’d have presided over it said it was clear as day to him that the board was in violation of TSHA’s bylaws. Ms. Jones and one other academic resigned as part of the agreement, freeing up two seats for non-academics. Board balance restored, lawsuit dropped.
Notice the commentary on Buenger’s resignation conveniently omitted that his contract had expired more than a year before he left? I noticed. Talk about hiding and erasing history. Jeez.
I’m sure y’all are tired of hearing about board seats. I am, too, but I can’t let this flub fly by without notice. Perhaps the “Ph.D.” after people’s names didn’t make academic members obvious enough for the reporter. Granted, a Ph.D. isn’t required by the bylaws. Teaching history is. But those letters are a pretty good signifier.
Here’s the board. Y’all do the math. Don’t count the Honorary Life (read: non-voting) board members like the reporter did, okay?
Non-academics: Ken Wise (president), Kent Hance, Whit Jones III, Lewis Fisher, Lance Lolley, Katharine Armstrong, W. Wesley Perry, Steve Ivy, Brandon Seale, Ramona Bass, Betty Edwards
Academics: Gene Preuss (U of H), Dolph Briscoe IV (A&M, San Antonio), Ricardo Romo (UTSA, retired), Max Grossman (UTEP), Carolyn Boyd (TSU), Steve Hardin (McMurry, retired), Bill Scott (Tech), Jose Angel Hernandez (U of H), Ana Martinez-Catsam (UTPB), W. F. Strong (UTRGV)
Even with my public school education, indeed, even without a calculator or a spreadsheet, I can work out that it’s twenty-one board members. Eleven non-academics and ten academics. The reporter went to Towson for four years but she came up with twenty-four board members, only five of them academics.
As for the tally of sex and skin color, that’s irrelevant but predictable from one who sees groups, rather than individuals. A range of perspectives and backgrounds are represented on the TSHA board now, in stark contrast with the OOPS board. No mention and certainly no criticism from the Observer that the president and manager of the activist alliance are both straight, white men. Curious, no?
Dr. Cervantes says he never felt like TSHA was a place he could present his research, yet he’s willing to serve on a board next to the very people who ran TSHA since he embarked on it? Not absurd at all.
In the three years he’s been in academia (he was a journalist for a decade before this) I find only a couple of presentations anywhere. Loads of grants and fellowships, though, in the last few years: Mellon, OAH, AHA, UNT, American Council of Learned Societies, American Society for Legal History, to name a few. Most interestingly, though, was the one administered by TSHA.
If his research is sound, his study of impoverished borderlands communities would be right at home at a TSHA annual meeting, in the Handbook or in the Quarterly. I find no entries or articles by Dr. Cervantes to either publication.
Sam Houston State is represented finely in the article by Dr. Uzma Quraishi. Her research was on immigration by Indian and Pakistani people to Houston after 1965. When she donated collection of research interviews to an archive, they filed them under immigration. Dr. Quraishi believes they should have been filed under “Asian Americans” and since they weren’t, this means the interview subjects aren’t Americans…somehow.
What I notice time and again about these folks is a lack of gratitude for what makes their careers. So many stories begin this way: “…and then I got to grad school and saw that NOBODY had studied this!” Isn’t that good news? It means the field is wide open for you to create that knowledge, for you to become the expert, for you to have a research career. Dr. Quraishi doesn’t express gratitude. Likewise she expresses no anger that another scholar of Indo-Pakistani descent didn’t conduct research on modern Indo-Asian migration to Houston. Nope. Instead, it’s oppression/suppression.
Every. Single. Time. Note to these scholars: nobody has to be the villain for you to be a hero if your work is good.
The next interviewee dished on a subject that may sound familiar to you:
Rachel “directed other slaves,” she said. Seriously? That’s a heck of a statement at a meeting of people who preach that we need to have “difficult conversations” about “honest” history. Rachel did not “direct” other slaves. According to those who lived with her, she applied the lash to other slaves. Are slaveowners now to be referred to as “slave directors,” I wonder? I’m joking, of course, but the tortuous things the OOPS crowd do to language in the name of identity-history knows no bounds.
On to May 03, Texas Monthly published their coverage with a Star Wars-themed headline:
Full disclosure: I was contacted for comment by the author of this article. Work and health appointments did not permit phone time, but I think it turned out just fine without me. Here we go!
They met in Fort Worth. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the cavalcade of land acknowledgments and who built Cowtown. Let’s skip to the portion about last year’s TSHA lawsuit:
The identity-history academics and journalists have omitted for a year now that Justice Jefferson is a black man. His career has been historic. He was the first black Supreme Court justice in Texas and the first black Chief Justice. In the pages of Texas Monthly and the Observer, though, he’s just a “prominent Republican.”
With the exception of a single 2023 article, all of the coverage has avoided these little details about the man the DEI crowd rejected for the TSHA board. If I were a different kind of woman, I’d be crowing about how they’re denying Justice Jefferson his identity and erasing his history! Instead, I have to remind you that he’s not black to them because he’s part of what they perceive to be the dominant culture. That’s right: Republican identity conveniently cancels out being descended from slaves and building one hell of a career.
Also omitted: the fact that the last decade of Ms. O’Rear’s teaching career was in college classrooms, not a high school. This is publicly available information, Texas Monthly. In fact, it’s in Ms. O’Rear’s bio on TSHA’s website.
I’ll give the author the benefit of the doubt here and assume he just didn’t look into a single friggin’ claim he made in the above paragraph. TSHA wasn’t paralyzed. The board was. The staff continued to work. Nancy Baker Jones’s legal fees were covered in full by TSHA’s director & officer insurance. The GoFundMe set up by her academic cohort - still active for some reason - even acknowledged the D&O insurance.
The claim about the settlement allowing Mr. Bryan to choose her replacement is patently false. The TSHA bylaws chose her replacement. Ken Wise was the First Vice President when she resigned. This is truly simple stuff. Good hustle, Texas Monthly.
There are several references to the “state’s leading academics” and the “state’s most prominent historians,” but men and women who meet those descriptions are absent from the article. Instead, we are treated to a couple of quotes from a Loyola (Chicago) professor and a retired HR manager. There are a few widely read and well-respected Texas historians who have opted to be members of both organizations, but their names weren’t dropped by Texas Monthly.
Because well-heeled Texans attended a TSHA fundraising event, as they always have, suddenly the TSHA is not an academic organization! I laughed out loud when I read this. I’m laughing now.
Who on God’s green earth do they think provided the funding for most of TSHA’s operations and academic activities when they were around? The folks who underwrite the grant money so vital to their careers don’t carry Wal-Mart handbags, as a rule. The people whose money funds the fellowships, endowed chairs and research facilities don’t buy their shampoo at Dollar General.
It’s okay to sneer at people for their material attainments, I guess, until you’re standing there with your hand out, hoping to be those attainments will help fund your organization. Like I said a year ago, the attitude is “Hand over your money and shut the hell up!”
This “heritage organization” talking point was ginned up well before the activist exodus and there’s some irony here worth pointing out. Many of the state’s actual top historians don’t write about their family histories or anything to which they are personally connected. Dr. Richard McCaslin, TSHA’s new publications director, is one of those. Ditto Dr. Stephen L. Hardin. Likewise Dr. Andrew Torget. J. P. Bryan springs to mind, as well, as someone whose interest in Texas history transcends his own lineage. There’s a museum full of proof of that fact in Galveston with his name on it.
What about the Identity-History Alliance? Here are a handful off the top of my head:
Walter Buenger says he got into history because of how his Anglo and German kin talked about the Civil War. Other than How-to-Rejigger-Texas-History manuals, what’s he written about? German Texans and secession.
Gary Pinkerton, who is quoted in this article? Wrote about Trammel’s Trace, where his roots are.
Dr. Bernadette Pruitt (Sam Houston State) was motivated to write/teach history by family stories she heard about the Great Migration.
A UTSA professor, who introduces herself as “Lilliana Saldana from Yanaguana, occupied territory known as San Antonio,” wrote her dissertation on the “identity and consciousness of Mexican American teachers at a dual-language school” because she taught at a dual language school.
Dr. John Moran Gonzalez, from Brownsville, renamed J. Frank Dobie’s signature “Life & Literature In The Southwest” course at U.T. to “Life & Literature of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” to “better reflect [his] orientation.”
Dr. Carlos Kevin Blanton (A&M), who writes about the history of bilingual education, says “I originally got into this topic because of family…because of family history, because of family stories.”
A U.T. doctoral student from the Valley, who teaches a radical feminism course studies “south texas identity formations via the grapefruit.” If you don’t speak jargon, she studies the generations of proud citrus growers where her family is from.
I could go on, but I’ll spare you. I would not expect anyone at Texas Monthly to ask the activist Alliance folks why they primarily write about themselves and/or their family histories or why they don’t call themselves a heritage society on those same grounds. Let’s keep moving!
That was the Express-News headline. And right off the rip: “[History is] recorded by victors who implant it in the national consciousness. Evidence be damned. Textbooks recount those stories without question.” It continues, “As such, history is most often the truth according to white males who seek to reflect the heroic acts and God-inspired ambitions of their Anglo ancestors. Heritage associations wrap themselves around those stories, too, perpetuating them. Together, they make sure slavery, genocide and the taking of lands are excluded from their narrative.”
This is the old “we still teach history like it’s 1950” trope. Textbooks are reviewed by teachers and professional historians. So let’s see who the evil white textbook reviewer was for the most widely used Texas history textbook. I have a copy on my desk.
Uh oh!
So the Cuban-born historian whose extensive professional career has been chiefly focused on Tejano history is giving his imprimatur to “evidence be damned” whitewashed history?
Or could it be that the author of this article hasn’t cracked a textbook in an incredibly long time and is regurgitating stories she’s heard about textbooks? Textbooks are not mythical creatures, ya know. They are available for purchase and professors/reporters could see with their own eyeballs what our textbooks contain if they cared to. Heck, they could even borrow mine if they asked politely.
The purpose of this setup by the San Antonio paper is to demean one group of historians to enhance the profile of another group, in much the same way activist historians treat groups in Texas history:
It was right there all along because the “new breed” ain’t new. I’ll keep asking this: if this history was hidden or erased, who are these scholars citing? They’re citing a generation of scholars before them who wrote about these subjects. And no heated words were exchanged at conferences. One yahoo got up and yelled at the 2023 conference.
Now the article quotes - the irony is so thick, you’ll need a Bowie knife to saw your way through it - Frank de la Teja, the suave gentleman from the Texas history textbook photo (above). I kid you not.
But didn’t she tell us that textbooks are full of whitewashed lies? And here’s the textbook reviewer saying quite the opposite. Dr. De La Teja goes on to say that he’s never encountered any obstacles in contributing to TSHA his work on Mexican history and the role of Tejanos in Texas history, and that he’s a member of both organizations. The reporter never fleshed out her J.P.-as-P.T.-Barnum analogy, but she did accuse him of “mansplaining.” to “historians of color” with Ph.D.s, presumably with a straight face.
That theme was carried forth in the same paper in a May 21 follow-up by an adjunct professor from Palo Alto College/San Antonio College.
Another variation on the theme I warned you about earlier: identity-history alliance, good; TSHA bad. Do you know a single person who shies away from or lacks awareness of Spanish and Mexican Texas history? But they need to pretend there are entire swaths of Texas who do and, as we’ll see in a minute, it’s all about politics. You can sniff out an activist historian from a mile away because they never stop talking about the politics of right now. Why? Because of identity and power.
Torres starts off okay, making the argument that a single historical event can have multiple interpretations. Very true. Then we jump the tracks.
Note the immediate pivot to present-day politics. They can’t help themselves. The 1836 Project Committee is hardly at the “vanguard of text production” in Texas. I don’t think Mr. Torres is aware of what that committee has done or will do, but he’s surely aware of how knowledge is produced. He’s part of the vanguard that produces it!
Does Mr. Bryan view history through “rose-colored lenses” because he wants to tell the plentiful stories in Texas history that are inspiring or simply descriptive, rather than prescriptive? No. Nobody was stopping the Identity History folks from writing their oppression narratives at TSHA. Nobody is now. But not all historians are activists, though, and there has to be a balance between the two. A lecture about the “entire truth” that denies that balance is a political argument, not an historical one.
At last we come to the Washington Post story. This one was a couple of years in the making, devoted to the professors who say the Texas Rangers perpetrated state-sanctioned violence against Mexican-Americans during the Mexican Revolution. The activist alliance made their way into the story, though, because the Loyola (Chicago) professor I mentioned before is associated with both. I won’t devote space to the Ranger portion, since I covered all of that in a 90-minute video some time ago, but one thing stuck out to me like a thumb after an unfortunate meeting with the business end of a claw hammer:
Get your Bowie knives back out because the irony is thick, y’all!
Buenger’s quote about how memory isn’t history, said to disparage the TSHA, is delicious in an article entirely about how Mexican-American family lore and memories are a historical indictment of the Texas Rangers. So memory cannot pass as history for some groups, but memory is a perfectly adequate stand-in for the historical record for other groups.
Kinda like how Justice Wallace Jefferson isn’t black to the activist alliance because he belongs to the supposed dominant (Republican) culture.
I doubt any of you are surprised by this media coverage and, from what I can see, none of it got much traction. My point here is to illustrate how sloppy it is, how critical facts are omitted to push a narrative tailored by the historians for their media allies, and how silly this whole damn thing is.
TSHA has surged forward and continues to produce the history of all Texans, but the OOPS alliance must rely on disparaging TSHA and disparaging other historians, just as much of the history they write requires disparaging one group to favor another. That’s the 21st century approach to history that Buenger describes as a “freight train.” It ain’t a freight train, it’s more of the same.
Activist journalists and activist historians are cut from the same cloth, in case you hadn’t noticed. Neither have earned our trust.
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