History Textbook to be Revised After Scrutiny from Parent

ELTON HO
Copy Editor

A recent controversy over a Texas textbook demonstrates that sometimes, it is not always best to go “by the book.”
In viral Facebook posts on Sept. 30 and Aug. 1, 11-year English teacher Roni Dean-Burren discussed an oddity found by her ninth-grade son in a McGraw-Hill World Geography textbook. In the section “Patterns of Immigration,” a caption for a U.S. map read: “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.”

Using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, Dean-Burren noted that the wording of this caption implied that the African slaves willingly immigrated to the U.S. as workers, rather than being forced into slave labor. The page next to the map then described the influx of European peoples, “many of whom came as indentured servants to work for little to no pay,” yet made no mention of the conditions in which Africans came to the U.S., as reported by the New York Times.

On Aug. 2, McGraw-Hill Education responded to Dean-Burren’s posts in a Facebook announcement, issuing an apology and offering stickers to replace the caption for the high schools using the textbook. The publishing company will rewrite the caption to be more accurate in the digital version of the textbook, as well as update the caption in the next printed version.