During the fall of any given election year, my Twitter/X feed is usually all Texas Longhorn football and Texas politics. Boy, did those two worlds collide this past week when the conversation turned to race.
It started after the Longhorns’ big comeback win over Ohio State — Hook ’Em — when Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photograph of South Asian students celebrating at the game and complained that Americans were being “displaced by foreigners”.
The response to his post came quickly, and not just from Democrats.
Republican leaders including Texas Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and Representative Drew Darby of San Angelo condemned French’ s comments. Karl Rove,thelongtimeRepublican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, called French a “bigot” and later wrote in his Wall Street Journal column that he’ll be voting for a Democrat for only the second time in his lifetime. His first Democrat was Bob Bullock.
Watching all of that unfold, I kept thinking about another picture.
It is a picture of my daughter Ally and two of her best friends from high school.
Three kids in purple graduation gowns. Three kids throwing up the Hook ’em sign. Three kids from a small school in the rural Texas Panhandle who were all headed to the University of Texas.
One distinguished himself through athletics. The other two through academics. UT is highly competitive — in 2022, automatic admission was generally reserved for Texas students in the top 6 percent of their graduating class.
They all three have different social, cultural and economic backgrounds and different family stories who all grew up together in the same small town. But they walked the same school halls.
Had the same teachers. Sat in the same classrooms. Took the same tests. Cheered at the same games.
If your picture of rural Texas looks like a Hallmark movie where everybody looks the same, you may need to spend a little more time in rural Texas.
Because that is not the Texas I know. And the numbers back that up.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Texas now has more than 31.7 million people. About 41 percent of Texans are Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent are Black and nearly 7 percent are Asian.
Those numbers are not some future version of Texas. They are Texas today — and you don’t have to travel to Austin, Dallas or Houston to see it.
On Sunday, I stood at a Catholic Church Jamaica celebration on Main Street in Spearman talking with a deacon about the event and the people gathered around us. He told me five cultures were represented in their church. Seems to me that is something worth celebrating.
Diversity is woven into the fabric of our rural communities. You can see it in our schools, our churches and the stands on Friday night. You can see it in the people caring for patients in our hospitals, running businesses, teaching our children, raising cattle, working in agriculture and gathering together at community celebrations.
Rural Texas is made up of many cultures, many traditions and many family stories. That is not something that takes away from who we are. It is part of what makes our communities strong.
Farmers and gardeners have always known that diversity matters. Good soil is not made up of just one thing; it takes a healthy mix to build the strongest foundation for a good harvest. The same is true of our communities, our state and our nation.
That is why I keep coming back to the question raised by the conversation this week.
When did diversity become something Texans were supposed to fear?
How did looking around and seeing Texans who don’t all look alike become evidence that something has gone wrong? This doesn’t have to be a Republican question or a Democratic question. In fact, the strong Republican criticism of French this week is evidence that it doesn’t fit neatly into those boxes.
This is a Texas question. Are we moving forward, learning to live together in a state that is growing and changing? Or are we moving backward, teaching another generation to see differences between their neighbors as something threatening?
I think about those three kids of ours in that graduation picture.
Before anyone sorted them into racial or demographic categories, they were simply friends. Kids who grew up together. Kids from Spearman. Kids headed to the University of Texas.
And I think about the people I stood with this weekend at a celebration in our little Panhandle town — people from different cultures sharing the same place and calling the same community home.
That is not some threat to Texas. It is Texas.
The question before Texas is not whether we are becoming more diverse, instead the question before Texas is whether we are willing to recognize the Texas that is already standing right in front of us.
About the Author Suzanne Bellsnyder is editor and publisher of the Hansford County Reporter-Statesman and Sherman County Gazette. A former Capitol staffer with decades of experience in Texas politics and policy, she now focuses on how state decisions shape rural life through her newspapers and Texas Rural Reporter column. Subscribe at Tex a s R u ra l Re p o rt e r. Substack.com.