McGraw-Hill to rewrite textbook after mom's complaint

[mfcorey1]

(CNN)Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill will rewrite a section in one of its books after a Houston-area mother complained that it whitewashes the role of slavery in bringing Africans to America.

Roni Dean-Burren took to Facebook last week to vent her frustration over the wording of a passage in her son's "World Geography" textbook that calls African slaves "workers" and "immigrants."

"The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers ... notice the nuanced language there. Workers implies wages ... yes?" she wrote.

Dean-Burren's post gathered a lot of attention; a subsequent video sparked spirited feedback and had drawn 1.4 million page views on Facebook as of Sunday.

McGraw-Hill heard the outcry, reviewed the section and concluded that the wording doesn't live up to the publisher's standards.

"We believe we can do better," McGraw-Hill posted on its Facebook page Friday. "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 edits will appear in the online version of the book immediately and will be included in the book's next printing.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/04/living/mcgraw-hill-slavery-textbook-mom-complaint-feat/index.html

[haele]

1. Ah, the Texas textbooks.

"Let's make sure that those dam' Northern and Left Coast liberals don't smear America by teaching nonsense about slavery and the need for unions and all that such. The Africans and others came over to improve their lives, and gladly worked free for the reward of being here in an elevated Christian situation with their gracious and merciful American sponsors from a Western European background, rather than living in a pagan squalor their own small tribal kingdoms in Africa. They didn't need or want any education other than the Bible, either. Same for the Native Americans - the majority of them welcomed the Europeans with open arms. Oh, and The War of Northern Aggression was about States rights. And there were African units fighting for the Confederacy, too."
There's a class of American - typically white and a self-proclaimed "moral expert" with a Christian perspective - that would prefer to think of slavery as practiced in the US as a multi-generational internship rather than an inhuman exercise in greed and feudalism - plantations and businesses being their own little fiefdoms within a greater "democracy".

Haele

[jwirr]

2. I wonder if they are just trying to make slavery into another

form of "indenture". Some of our white ancestors came here as indentured servants. Sometimes it was family members who were expected to pay the cost of immigration by agreeing to work a prescribed number of years for who ever paid the fee. The length of indenture was between 5-7 years. But it was also a way of getting workers that were not related to you when you needed them.

The difference of course was in length of time - slavery had not limits and slavery was used for black persons only. Indenture was not considered ownership which slavery always assumed.

It looks to me that the authors of this "history" book are trying to say the two practices were the same.

[Scuba]

3. ...