Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Historical revisionism at one of America's largest book publishers

About the video (below):

     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. [emphasis added]
     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.”