Roni Dean-Burren
One of the biggest publishers in the U.S. apologized yesterday for calling slaves brought to America “workers” in a geography textbook used widely in Texas, where the wording went unnoticed during the state’s combative and politically charged classroom curriculum reviews.
Instead it was the mother of a 15-year-old high school freshman near Houston who prompted McGraw-Hill Education to take the unusual step of promising immediate revisions and new supplemental lessons about the Atlantic slave trade. Roni Dean-Burren, whose son pointed out the wording in his world geography textbook to his mom, ignited outrage on social media last week after posting her disbelief.
Roughly a quarter of Texas’ 1,200 school districts use the textbook, according to state officials. The publisher didn’t respond to questions about how many other classrooms in the U.S. purchased copies with the same phrasing.
“We are deeply sorry that the caption was written this way,” McGraw-Hill Education CEO David Levin said in a letter to employees. “While the book was reviewed by many people inside and outside the company, and was made available for public review, no one raised concerns about the caption. Yet, clearly, something went wrong and we must and will do better.”
The caption in the ninth-grade textbook accompanies a map of the U.S. in a section about immigration. It reads: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”
Dean-Burren, a former English teacher who is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, found out about the caption when her son texted her picture of the page, telling her, “We was real hard workers weren’t we.” AP
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