McGraw-Hill to rewrite textbook after mom’s complaint

“It just says we were workers”. Dean-Burren also pointed out in her video that several professional consultants and the Texas Advisory Board are listed in the front of the book, and supposedly signed off on the book’s text. The motive behind the textbook’s choice of words seemed clear.

“This is erasure”, Dean-Burren said.

One commenter urged the publisher to replace the textbooks.

“We believe we can do better”, McGraw-Hill posted on its Facebook page Friday.

The book “World Geography” refers to African slaves as “workers” and “immigrants”.

The publisher offered an apology and will correct the textbook.

The online version will be changed as soon as edits are determined and the new and improved language will be present in the next printing of the textbook. In the video, which has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, she explains why referring to slaves as “workers” is detrimental to history. “I understand that McGraw-Hill is a textbook giant, so thumbs up for listening”.

It was called “Patterns of Immigration” and she posted her concerns on YouTube. They were sold and sent across the sea in bad conditions.

Dean-Burren said she felt it was insulting that there was little to no mention of Africans as slaves.

The criticism from a conservative organization may be particularly noteworthy, since the controversial standards gaining ground in Texas (and popping up in similar debates from Colorado to Virginia) are often pushed by Republican-dominated committees and school boards, particularly when it comes to interpretations of the Civil War. The publisher didn’t respond to questions about how many other classrooms in the USA purchased copies with the same phrasing. If a textbook is “adopted”, it means the book gets a vote of support from the Texas state government. “We have a textbook adoption process that’s so politicized and so flawed that it’s become nearly a punch line for comedians”. These issues included declaring that a Muslim garb hinders women’s rights, palliating the inequalities African Americans faced under Jim Crow and representing slavery as only a secondary cause of the Civil War. “Slavery was not the best part of history”.

“It’s kind of like teaching physics and stopping at Newton without bringing in Einstein”, said Countryman, who reviewed a few of the Texas books for this school year. Though African people did work on plantations between 1500 and 1800 as the textbook suggested, they were forced to work against their will. In fact, numerous African people were brought over on slave ships for the sole goal of being sold into slavery; however, the McGraw-Hill textbook left that detail out of the passage.

He urged, “Answer your phone”. Her son, Coby Burren, texted her a picture of the caption in his textbook that described an immigration map.