Ross: No blame, but redemption

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Celebrities and guests visit the Alamo on March 27, 2004, at Disney’s first After Party in San Antonio, Texas. (Photo by Jill Torrance / Getty Images)

I read a book called Forget the Alamo – and I’m talking about an author with guts. Jason Stanford, who co-authored this book, and lives in Austin, uses records kept by the Mexican side during the assault on the Alamo to show that Davy Crockett did NOT fight, but even more controversially, Alamo. took a stand for a reason: they wanted to prevent the Mexican government from abolishing slavery in Texas, which would have destroyed the cotton plantations run by American immigrants.

This, of course, is heresy in Texas. The State Board of Education actually requires school children to learn a heroic version of Alamo’s story. But Stanford says he’s not trying to send Texans on a guilt trip, even though he supports efforts like Critical Race Theory to decensitize US history.

“I think it’s a useful way to understand the country,” Stanford said. “I think we have to say, ‘OK, what’s the next step’. It is very interesting and instructive that we have an inherently systemic racist country. Alright, what then? The story of us cannot be that we are bad to the bone and tear it apart. We’re not going to tear it up. We are here now.

So he’s not trying to make white Texans feel guilty, he just thinks it’s wrong to base patriotism on a state-sponsored lie.

He thinks there is a better way to instill love for the country. And this is to teach students to honor the process of peaceful change defined in the Constitution of the United States:

“We have included in our founding document the mechanism for continuous self-improvement. We are a story of redemption. We are not supposed to have it all figured out at the start. We are supposed to keep working to improve ourselves. That’s what history shows us, is that no matter where we started, we can still do better. And we have. And I think it’s a story that doesn’t divide us and brings us both together around the truth.

He also told me that the Hispanic people of Texas have long been in turmoil about Alamo’s official side of the story, and as they will soon be in the majority, it might be wise to start teaching the facts. now, rather than later.

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