An unwarranted Texas takeover of schools in Black-and-brown-led Houston is the latest in a growing Republican war on democratic elections. When a state takeover of public schools in Houston — America’s fourth-largest city, and the biggest in Texas — was announced last week by state education officials under Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, the national media mostly treated it as a local story not worthy of much coverage in a nation now transfixed by the potential arrest of POTUS 45.
But what’s going down in Houston should be a much bigger deal, for two reasons.
First of all, the move is outrageous. Despite facing the same struggles as most large urban sch
Dixon is speaking to the second, and arguably even more important, reason why America should be paying much closer attention to events deep in the heart of Texas. The Houston school takeover didn’t take place in a vacuum. Instead, it’s just the latest example of what’s becoming a defining trait of today’s Republican Party, and at the core of why people are tagging the GOP as an anti-democracy movement.
Increasingly, Republicans are using their control of statehouses in red America to simply override election results in blue-dot localities that they don’t like, but especially when the ballot box winners are the choice of Black and brown voters. In Houston, where seven of Houston’s nine elected school trustees are African American or Latino, the Abbott administration’s moves against the school district accelerated around the same time that the city’s Harris County also elected 19 judges who are Black, female and Democratic.
