Wed, Oct 07, 2015 page7

• African ‘workers’ caption starts school furor

  • The Guardian
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  It started with a text from a Houston-area ninth-grader to his mother.

  On reading a caption in his geography textbook that described slaves as “workers,” Coby Burren sent a photograph and an annoyed message to his mother.

  “We was real hard workers wasn’t we,” he wrote.

  Roni Dean-Burren was also disturbed by the language, and posted about the book online. Her comments went viral and the publisher swiftly decided to rewrite the section.

  The offending passage was in pages titled “Patterns of Immigration” in McGraw-Hill Education’s World Geography textbook.

  A colorful map of the US was adorned with a speech bubble that said: “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, and thousands of others who reacted on social media, objected to a choice of words that seemed to imply that slaves were economic migrants.

  “Immigrants. Yeah, that word matters — immigrants,” she said. “So it is now considered immigration.”

  She pointed to a section on the facing page that described Europeans who traveled to the US to work as indentured servants, for little or no pay.

  “They say that about English and European people, but there is no mention of African immigrants working as slaves or being slaves. It just says that we were workers,” she said.

  Last Friday, McGraw-Hill Education issued a statement saying it would change the wording in future editions: “We conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.”

  “We believe we can do better. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the US as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor. These changes will be reflected in the digital version of the program immediately and will be included in the program’s next print run,” the publisher said.

  In response, Dean-Burren wrote on Facebook: “This is change people. This is why your voices matter. You did this.”

  It is far from the only controversy surrounding Texas textbooks, which in recent years have become a battleground for ideological disputes.

  In 2010, Christian conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education approved a curriculum that they saw as redressing liberal biases by promoting such topics as religion’s role in the founding of the US, Reaganism, the undermining of US sovereignty by the UN and why the McCarthyism of the 1950s was not so bad after all.

  The board also suggested that the slave trade be termed the “Atlantic triangular trade.”

  Last year, the board approved a politics textbook that listed Moses as a key influence on the US’ founding fathers.

  How to cover climate change and creationism have also provoked controversy. Last year, McGraw-Hill made changes after a proposed textbook wrongly stated that there was no scientific consensus on the cause of global warming and cited a right-wing think tank that is a prominent climate-change denier.

  In another example of the kind of understated use of language that upset Dean-Burren, the curriculum standards call for “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” to be taught as causes of the civil war — placing slavery third, although it was the central reason.
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