Texas textbooks are once again in the limelight. After years of asking for ethnic studies, they finally offered them. The only problem is that the books are teaching young minds the Donald Trump message   that Mexicans are lazy and want to destroy the country.School textbooks in Texas have long been a source of controversy because Texas textbook writers play more than a little loose with facts. The books whitewash slavery and the Civil War, they completely ignore the existence of the KKK and of the Jim Crow era. They mention segregation, but only as a footnote and only as something that s not that bad.Texas science books teach creationism, that the earth is 6,000 years old and that there s no such thing as climate change. Now, they are teaching pure racism and xenophobia and kids across the nation could be learning those lessons.Not surprisingly, Republicans outnumber Democrats in the Texas Board of Education by two to one. Democrats have been trying for two years to create a Mexican-American studies program, which makes perfect sense since the majority of Texas public school children are Latino.Republicans on the board balked at the idea, but they finally caved, sort of. There are now Mexican-American studies, but they are as racist as a Donald Trump rally or as the GOP convention happening in Cleveland.(Attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Celina) Moreno and other activists are part of the new Responsible Ethnic Studies Text Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as  multiple factual errors.  The coalition said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and  70s as adopting  a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society. Industrialists were very driven, competitive men,  the textbook says, according to excerpts.  In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day s work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of  manana,  or  tomorrow.' Source: My San AntonioRepublicans evan admit that they did it just to piss Democrats off.You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it,  (Board member, David) Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses. I m Italian, Irish and French,  Bradley said.  And I feel like I m being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas. the books aren t out yet. They are up for a vote in November, but the really frightening thing is that if they are published, students around the nation could be reading that Mexicans are lazy.Featured image via Pixabay.  