Through an interpretive analysis of how high school American history textbooks depict the urban-riots of the late-1960s, in this article the author discusses how textbooks incorporate and abject official knowledge related to the intersections of race and poverty. Incorporation is related with Raymond Williams' theory of the selective tradition and Michael Apple's theory of official knowledge. Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory of abjection is utilized throughout this article as a counterpoint to these theories of incorporation and to reflexively elucidate how textbooks expel resistant knowledge and students from the curricular body of official knowledge.