If you stand for nothing, you fall for anything
Roni Dean-Burren wasn’t going to stand for her ninth-grade son taking in erroneous information in his history book. The mom vented on Instagram about a misleading interpretation of history in World Geography by McGraw-Hill Education, according to Buzzfeed.
A passage in the textbook, “Patterns of Immigration,” got history all wrong: The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. She explained further in a Facebook video that the book edition mentions Europeans being immigrants, but it makes no mention of Africans entering North America as slaves. The video has since been viewed over one million times.
Due to the backlash, the publisher said in a statement that it would make a change in its next edition:
Source: This Mom Questioned A Book Publisher For Calling Slaves “Workers” | Global GrindWe 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. These changes will be reflected in the digital version of the program immediately and will be in the 2016 textbook version.