Slaves were immigrant workers? Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy

[uhnope]

HOUSTON — Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves.
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He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, along with a text message: “we was real hard workers, wasn’t we.”

Their outrage over the textbook’s handling of the nation’s history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as “indentured servants” but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school’s teachers to use other materials in the class. “It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.”

Ms. Dean-Burren cataloged her objections to the caption last week in posts on Facebook and Twitter. The posts, along with a video she made while flipping through the book, were widely shared, catching the attention of the #blacklivesmatter movement as the video alone reached nearly two million views.

READ MORE http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html?WT.mc_id=2015-KWP-AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&kwp_0=50861&kwp_4=289090&kwp_1=199454

Excellent but WTF in the first place

[fasttense]

1. I was reading up on ancient Rome's slavery practises

And it noted that slaves were NOT allowed to offer testimony at trial unless they were tortured. No surprise there. That is NOT unusual. But what was unusual was the logic behind it. They thought that slaves would be so loyal to their masters that they would never willingly tell about their master's illegal or immoral activities because they so loved their masters. Really? Loyal to the person who physically and sexually abused you regularly? Romans were so horrible to their slaves that the average life span of a slave in Rome was 17 and 1/2 years. In Rome if you survived to the age of 10 you would probably live well into your 50s unless you were a slave of course.

But here is the kicker the average life span of an African slave in the South from initial purchase to death was 7 years. And this was better than Caribbean slaves' life expectancy.

The brutality of slavery is just overwhelming when you look at life expectancy.