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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannon316m6.substack.com

“McKinney Pool Party” (video), available in full at Washington Post.

W. Kamau Bell, “How Do You Know It’s Racism?” Comedy Album, A Semi-Prominent Negro, 2017.

Jessica Williams, “McKinney Bikini,” The Daily Show with John Stewart, 2025.

“McKinney Pool Party,” Viral Video, June 2015.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannon316m6.substack.com

TLDR: Texas House Bill 2497, better known as the 1836 Project, was a bill created in June 2021 by the Texas House of Representatives and was signed into law by Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas. The flagship project: a 15-page pamphlet designed to tell “the story of Texas” to be distributed at the DMV w/your driver’s license. This is the story whiteness tells to itself about itself. My goal: to interrogate that pernicious relationship between state-sanctioned “patriotic education” projects like this one and white supremacy. It’s a lot.

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Interview, D.W. Griffith (1935)

“The Most Racist Movies in Cinematic History,” Left in Texas. Podcast. December 2023.

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You know where black comedy began, don’t you? It began on the slave ships (Richard Pryor, Bicentennial N-, 1976)

Slavery . . . is not funny. Like, its not funny, you know what I mean? But if you can make it funny? Like, you gotta make it real funny. (Keegan-Michael Key, 2015)

Episode includes the following: Dick Gregory, University of Iowa, Darwin Turner Lecture Series on Black Studies (1970); Richard Pryor (Bicentennial N-Word, 1976); Amber Ruffin, “Why We Need White History Month” (The Amber Ruffin Show, 2021); Franny Choi, “Whiteness Walks into a Bar” (2016).

* Dick Gregory, 1970 (University of Iowa)

Scholarship/theory to help us along with these readings/conversations:

Morgan, Danielle Fuentes. Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. (University of Illinois UP, 2020)

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Ames, Bill. Texas Trounces the Left’s War on History (Taylor Publishing, 2021)

On Sandra Cisneros . . .

I talk a lot about some undue and infuriating hate thrown at the beloved and brilliant Sandra Cisneros, from one of the “Moms” in the group Ames gleefully calls the “Mom’s Project” . . . she says Cisneros is being included in the third grade curriculum and “she writes erotic poetry!”). I talk about book covers, believing for sure the book included (unnamed in her written comment to the board) must be The House on Mango Street but also allow for the distant possibility that somehow for some reason the second exists somewhere in the orbit of this Garland mother and her three children . . .

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street (1983)

The controversial covers of her book of powerful, empowering poetry . . . sexy, yes, beautiful and tasteful—but in a pretty damn tame, to my mind.

Cisneros, Sandra. My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987)

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The Birth of Texas: Martyrs at the Alamo (1915)

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Interview, DW Griffith (1930)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannon316m6.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shannon316m6.substack.com