What Happens When Public Universities Erase LGBTQ+ And Black History: What This Means For Parents And Teachers
I sat at my scuffed kitchen table last Tuesday, half a chocolate chip cookie melting next to my cold coffee, while my 17-year-old niece Lila scrolled through college admissions pages on my laptop. She’s a senior, Black and queer, wants to major in elementary education, and Texas Tech was at the top of her in-state list for its affordable tuition and well-regarded ed program. When the news alert about the recent lawsuit popped up, she paused, squinted, and looked up at me. “Wait, they’re being sued for cutting LGBTQ+ and Black history from classes? I thought this was supposed to be one of the better options around here.”
I nodded, and told her what I’d read. The lawsuit, filed by three professors and two students, argues that after Texas passed its 2021 ban on teaching critical race theory, Texas Tech administrators pressured faculty to strip entire units from their courses. One sociology professor cut a whole section on how Black trans activists led the modern queer rights movement. A humanities course lost readings on redlining’s impact on modern housing inequality, and modules on Black feminist activism were removed from multiple education classes. Administrators say they’re just following state law, but the suit argues they’ve gone far beyond what the law requires to censor any content that might make white students uncomfortable.
A few weeks before that, a mom had come up to me after back-to-school night at the high school where I teach 10th grade history, twisting her car keys in her palm while she asked why the Compton Cafeteria riot was listed on my syllabus. She’d seen the early reporting about the cuts at Texas Tech, she said, and she was worried that if my students learned this content, it would hurt their chances of getting into college, or hurt their scores on state standardized tests. I get that worry. When the biggest public higher education institutions in the state are sending a message that certain stories are too risky to teach, it makes everyone nervous to touch them. Parents worry about their kids’ future, teachers worry about losing their jobs, and even students start self-censoring when they ask questions about history.
This isn’t just a Texas Tech problem, and it’s not just a college problem. What happens at public universities trickles down to every level of education, especially when we’re talking about teacher training. More than two-thirds of public school teachers in Texas get their degrees from state-run public universities like Texas Tech. If those programs cut Black and LGBTQ+ history from their education courses, new teachers graduate never having learned that content themselves. You can’t teach what you never learned. A new 4th grade teacher who never learned about how redlining shaped segregated public schools in Texas isn’t going to add that to their lesson plan, no matter how good their intentions are. That’s the ripple effect that doesn’t make the headline: it’s not just the 1000 undergrads at Texas Tech who miss out. It’s the 20,000 K-12 students those undergrads will go on to teach over their careers.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that big policy changes take forever, and lawsuits drag on for years. In the meantime, there are small, low-effort things both teachers and parents can do to make sure kids get the full story, without taking on a ton of extra work. For teachers, I started doing something a couple years ago that takes me less than an hour a month: I keep an ungraded “Extra History” folder in my Google Classroom, linked at the top of the class page. I tie whatever I add to what we’re already covering that month. When we talk about the Great Depression, I add a short oral history from a Black sharecropper in East Texas that didn’t make it into our textbook. When we cover the 1960s civil rights movement, I add a 10-minute podcast clip about Barbara Jordan, the Black queer Texas state senator who was the first woman to give a keynote at the Democratic National Convention. I mention it once at the end of class, say “this is just here if you want to learn more, no need to write anything about it, no extra credit.” Half the class checks out something every month, and I don’t have to grade anything new. It’s low risk, low effort, and it fills in the gaps that textbooks and administrators leave.
For parents, you don’t need to turn your dinner table into a college lecture hall to push back. If you have a high schooler applying to college, just spend 15 minutes pulling up the intro course syllabi for their intended major on the department website. Most public universities post them publicly, even for non-students. You can see for yourself if Black and LGBTQ+ history is woven into the core curriculum, or if it’s just a one-off reading during Pride or Black History Month. Lila did this with me after we saw the lawsuit news, and we found that the Texas Tech ed program cut its required diversity course from three credits to one, so that’s something she’s weighing against the lower tuition. For parents of younger kids, just add one unknown story a month to your regular dinner conversation. Last month, my 12-year-old and I talked about Bessie Coleman, the first Black female pilot who got her training in France because no US flight school would accept her, and then did air shows all across Texas. This month, we’re talking about the queer Chicano teens who organized the first gay pride march in Houston in 1979. It takes two minutes, no worksheets, no tests, it just adds a story that doesn’t usually get told to your regular chatter about homework and soccer practice.
Lila still hasn’t crossed Texas Tech off her list. The tuition discount makes a huge difference for our family, and we don’t know how the lawsuit will turn out. There’s no neat ending to this, the fight over what history gets taught isn’t going to wrap up next month or even next year. But I do know that erasure only works if no one tells the stories outside the official curriculum. The folder in Google Classroom, the two-minute story at dinner, the 15-minute check of a college syllabus—those small acts add up, even when big institutions are trying to cut those stories out. The stories still get passed on, one conversation at a time.
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