No one can honestly say that slavery had nothing to do with the Alamo and Texas independence when whites were expected to respect slavery and the supposed inferiority of nonwhite people. The mission imposed upon whites in America was to accept the ideology of white supremacy. Not to accept this slave owner heritage would result in legal punishments and violence. In this way, white supremacy became the norm, both spoken and unspoken, both legally and by racist tradition. People were racially politicized in the North and the South. This included being socialized with certain political ideas by family, schools, churches/religion, mass media, peers, and events. The “Texan Creed,” which is primarily a belief system of whites in Texas, consists of beliefs in tradition and deed. It included liberty (for whites only), individualism (hatred), constitutionalism (with racist laws), and equality (for whites only). Their “traditions” cannot be taken at face value without knowing what they really meant. These traditions are still loaded with racist myths and loaded with racist loyalty to an invented bigoted past. They were designed to subjugate, exploit, and oppress people of color and poor whites as well. These nightmare traditions infected whites in Texas for generations. It is important to note that over 54 percent of the American population reads below 6th grade level, and this explains how white supremacy depends on ignorance.
The formula for honestly looking at the Alamo story is racism plus myth equals falsehoods. Many viruses were created in the laboratories of white supremacy. Popular imagination would become more than whimsical thought with this infection. There are dozens of ignored or erased facts and invented stories about the war in Texas with Mexico and the slave owner fighters at the Alamo. The storytellers of patented racism combined myth with hatred and called it liberty and freedom when in fact there was no liberty or freedom after the fight at the Alamo or even after the Civil War. This mix of lies likes to ignore historical facts. For example, James Bowie was a major slave owner and a drunk. He was basically a foil of Travis. Bowie succeeded in creating problems that resulted in a fragmented joint command structure as a result of trying to seek a surrender option with Santa Anna, as well as releasing prisoners that Travis had court-martialed. Additionally, there was never a line drawn in the sand—a William Zuber invention, or a Black slave woman named Emily Morgan (Emily West was actually her real name) having a sexual relation with Santa Anna. This was all lies generated to push the ideas of white supremacy to heights that would eventually curse us all.
The whole of the Alamo story became a white supremacist propaganda campaign made holy by attaching it to the fight against a dictator that abolished a “democratic” constitution. What is ignored is the fact that one dictatorship replaced another after Mexico’s defeat—a white supremacist Texan dictatorship based on race. “The Alamo City” should become “The River City,” as the story about what happened at the short battle of the Alamo is an absurd lie. Historians should not tiptoe around the issue of slavery. Soft pedaling slavery and white supremacy to save a lie is outrageous to say the least. For many of us, we know we have been given a racist historical account that is still being hammered into the minds of tourists and students. We will no longer hold fast to outrageous, deceptive, false history in its shameful denial of historical facts.
