McGraw-Hill Education said it would reword the part of a geography textbook that includes slaves under a section about “immigrants” and refers to them as “workers.”
A publisher says they are rewriting a high school textbook that refers to African slaves as "workers" after a complaint by a Texas mother about the passage went viral.
Roni Dean-Burren wrote on social media that her 15-year-old son was reading his textbook for his ninth-grade geography class when he noticed a passage that bothered him.
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.
Dean-Burren wrote on social media she was shocked by the language used. After getting many responses, she decided to make a video to talk in depth about the book and how she felt about it.
She said she feels it is insulting to include African slaves under a section about "immigrants" and refer to them as "workers."
Dean-Burren said the textbook also discusses how some European people came to America as "indentured servants" who received "little to no pay."
"So they say that about English and European people, but there is no mention of African working as slaves or being slaves," she said. "It just says we were workers."
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A Mom Called Out A Textbook Publisher For Saying Slaves Were "Workers" And "Immigrants"