Textbook publisher changes wording after Texas mom calls them out for labeling slaves as immigrant 'workers'

A Houston mother was surprised when she looked through her 9th grade son's textbook and found that the "World Geography" book did not mention slavery.

TheGrio Staff

Oct 5, 2015

A Houston mother was surprised when she looked through her 9th grade son’s textbook and found that the “World Geography” book did not mention slavery.

Instead, the book Roni Dean-Burren‘s 15-year-old son was given at Pearland High School had a section called “patterns of immigration” in which Africans are described as having been brought to the Americas as “workers” rather than as slave labor, reports KTRK.

“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 read.

“Immigrants — yeah that word matters,” she scoffed.

The Texas mother decided to take matters into her own hands and turned to YouTube, posting a video about the revisionist history of the textbook.

The publisher, McGraw-Hill, has since responded to the video on Facebook and has agreed to rewrite the passage. “We believe we can do better,” the publisher said in their response.

This is the first response from the publisher, who came under fire earlier this year about whitewashing history in the Texas textbooks.

Dean-Burren is an teaching fellow at the University of Houston and PhD candidate, specializing in education curriculum.

“I want to see how they treat the history of native Americans, women’s history,” she told KTRK. “All of these stories, I’m really wondering how they’re being told in history. This is the first step. What does the U.S. history book look like?”