The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers...notice the nuanced language there. Workers implies... Posted by Roni Dean-Burren on Wednesday, September 30, 2015
A Texas mother garnered attention on .
A caption in the McGraw-Hill Education book said that the Atlantic slave trade 鈥渂rought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.鈥� Roni Dean-Burren had received a text message with a photo of the page from her 9th grade son. 鈥淲e was real hard workers wasn鈥檛 we,鈥� he wrote to his mother.
Dean-Burren, a former high school English teacher, followed up with a implying that their movement was voluntary. She suggests that the book is part of a larger problem with the textbook approval process in Texas.
McGraw-Hill responded a day later on Facebook.
[W]e conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. We believe we can do better. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.
The publisher said it will update the digital version immediately and change the print version on its next run.
However, as , the book in question had a copyright date of 2016, and the next print version could be a decade away.
The for the first time since 2002. . Left-leaning groups said some books exaggerated the influence of religion on the founding of the United States. Right-leaning groups said some books were too pro-Islam. The Republican-controlled board approved nearly all of the books being considered.
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