Houston students recently started a petition and lobbied the Texas State Board of Education to adopt anti-racist curriculum in Houston K-12 schools. One proponent of this petition, Erika Alvarez, describes this curriculum as “stopping a bully”. She goes on to state that “there’s a bully, there’s a victim, there’s also a bystander, if you’re, like, simply just not racist, you are that bystander. And, they tell you in school, they teach you, being a bystander is bad, because you’re complicit in the act.” Much of this rhetoric is similar to Ibram X Kendi’s claim that one cannot be “race neutral” and must either be actively fighting against the racism that is ingrained in our nation’s core institutions, or be a racist. Kendi claims that “the construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans toward equity is reverse discrimination”.
One of the goals of the petition is to disrupt and reconstruct the STAAR test. Students claim this test does not accurately assess the knowledge of students and instead simply shows unequitable outcomes throughout Houston’s K-12 schools.
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