I thought that
it was a joke but
it wasn't:
Where does geography meet history? A schoolbook book calling African slaves “workers” in pages titled Patterns of Immigration was discovered by a concerned mother in Texas. After she exposed the gaffe on Facebook, the publisher found itself in hot water
Gaffe? What gaffe? What do you think the purpose of transporting Africans to the New World was for? Vacationing? Touring? Here's the original text:
“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,” the book says.
And the problem?
“…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.” McGraw Hill Education said in the post.
What? What part of "The Atlantic
Slave Trade" doesn't the reader understand? Clearly by saying "Atlantic Slave Trade" the Africans status was stated and why they were transported, To
WORK the various cash crops, is also clear? What is there to be offended about?
Dean-Burren and many others on social media were especially angered by the implication that slaves were merely labor migrants who hadn’t been forced to come to the US to work on agricultural plantations.
Dean-Burren is an idiot who should have told as much. There is no
implication that describing the
why of enslavement, work, implies that slavery equals voluntary immigration. That is entirely in Dean-Burren's head.
Another passage points out that Europeans who came to the US as indentured servants worked for little or no pay. However, there were no similar comments on people coming from Africa.
“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.
Get a clue. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade" is THE ONLY comment needed to establish the status of enslaved Africans. No one of reasonable intelligence needs to have the word "slave" repeated in every reference to Africans in order to know the status of the the majority of Africans in the Americas at that time.
Can we please stop pandering to the perpetually offended and clueless people looking for attention?
