YOUR FAVORITE MTV SHOWS ARE ON PARAMOUNT+

This Textbook Company Is Making Some Serious Revisions After Calling Slaves ‘Workers’ And 'Immigrants'

Talk about rewriting history.

Textbook company McGraw-Hill announced that they are making some major edits this week, after it was discovered that a section of one of their world geography textbooks referred to slaves brought to the United States during the Atlantic Slave Trade as "workers" in a section of the book about "patterns of immigration."

Roni Dean-Burren shared a photo from the textbook on Facebook on Wednesday (Sept. 30) after getting a text from her son Coby, a ninth-grader at a public high school in Pearland, Texas, the Washington Post reports.

Dean-Burren, a former-English teacher and a current PhD candidate at University of Houston, told Washington Post that the language used in the textbook is an example of "erasure" of uglier parts of history, a “revisionist history — retelling the story however the winners would like it told.”

In a video she posted on her Facebook on Thursday (Oct. 1), Dean-Burren flips through the book and points out a range of professionals (from historians to the Texas Advisory Board) who each put a seal of approval on the text.

"It is now considered immigration." Dean-Burren said of the book's phrasing when referring to people brought to the U.S. as slaves. "That word matters 'immigrants.'... So, it [the slave trade] is now considered 'immigration.'"

Dean-Burren's posts started to get attention and, by Friday evening (Oct. 2), McGraw-Hill Education responded to the objections on their Facebook page.

"This program addresses slavery in the world in several lessons and meets the learning objectives of the course," the textbook manufacturer wrote in the post. "However, 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."

The post went on to say that the company will update their captions "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" in future print editions and immediately in their digital version.

MTV News has reached out to McGraw-Hill Education for comment.

Latest News