Hannah Soyer
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About two weeks ago, 15-year-old Coby Burren, a freshman at Pearland High School near Houston noticed something in his geography textbook: Africans brought to America to work on plantations between the 1500s and 1800s were referred to as “workers” instead of as “slaves.” Coby took of photo of the page in his textbook and sent it to his mother, who has since made a video about it that has been circulated through her Facebook and Twitter. Coby and his mother are black.
This is a classic example of erasure, or the removal of a certain part of our country’s history from the records. I never liked history and often wondered what the point of such a class was, but the truth of it is that learning the history of this country helps us to better understand it now, and the people who are living in it. To represent such a horrendous period as the slave trade in American history as anything less than atrocious, to claim slaves were merely “workers,” is a false depiction of the wrongs people in this country were capable of.
Unfortunately, this is something that seems to happen to minorities not only in this country but in the world in general. Take for example the people who still claim the Holocaust never happened. The general public sees Holocaust deniers as absurd, if not insane. America opened its Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 in Washington, D.C.
However, it wasn’t until Dec. 7, 2014, that America opened its first museum and memorial of slavery, located in Louisiana on the Whitney Plantation. I am in no way trying to compare the Holocaust to American slavery or claim that one was more terrible than the other. It may be that we in America have an easier time memorializing something that occurred on a different continent, something that we actively fought to end. Individually, we may not think it is difficult to come to terms with how our country was involved in the slave trade, right here on this soil. However, it clearly is a problem of the national consciousness as a whole, if we still have textbooks referring to slaves as “workers,” and we didn’t have a slavery museum until less than a year ago.
It’s not any surprise that the textbook in question was being used at a school in Texas, the heart of the conservative South, but that doesn’t make it right. Perhaps it is all too easy to look at this situation and say that it’s simply one word in a textbook and that it doesn’t really matter.
But what is taught to us in K-12 school does matter, because it shapes how students, the future of this country, perceive the world around them. On top of this, textbooks are generally seen as an objective source of fact, and so when the word “workers” is used instead of “slaves,” it is adding to the culture of erasure in a very sinister way.