Distorted IdentitiesExplicating Textbook Narratives in

Segregate Schools in East Texas

The Norris School

Discovery

Textbooks• Treasure Gold (1964),• Finding New Neighbors (1957)• Days of Adventure (1962)• Exploring Elementary Mathematics (1970)

The Power of Distortion

Jonathan Zimmerman:“. . . that racist textbooks, like segregated classrooms, were “psychologically damaging” to black children” (47)

The Power of Distortion

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

. . .[W]hen you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fun-town is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people. . . . (592).

--Martin Luther King Jr.

Treasure Gold: Illustrations

“A Hint of Whiteness: History Textbooks and Social Construction of Race in the Wake of the Sixties”

• Richard L Hughes argues that criticism of these textbooks have focused on two issues:

• (1) that blacks were largely absent from the story of American history and (2) that when texts included blacks in a few areas such as slavery and Reconstruction, they portrayed blacks in such a way as to ‘reinforce all the old Negro stereotypes’ [citations removed] of childlike caricatures or social problems ill-prepared for the demands of citizenship. (202)

“Tommy for President”

Depictions of White Men“First Men to the Moon”

Days of Adventure

Days of AdventureLabeling Nationalities as Other

New Moon

Pablo

Transitional TextsExploring Elementary Mathematics