You Won't Believe What This Textbook Company Calls American Slaves

In what sense can people brought to a country by force — kidnapped — be called immigrants? 

A black mother in Texas, Roni Dean-Burren, wanted to know the same thing. Her ninth-grade son showed her a section in his geography textbook, “Patterns of Immigration.” It included Africans forced into slavery under the category of immigrants. Leftists like referring to the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” but publishing company McGraw-Hill went a few steps too far.

It’s surprising that McGraw-Hill was this politically incorrect when you’d expect the opposite from a mainstream publisher. Sufficiently chastised, the company released this statement on Facebook:

 

There’s one thing conservatives and liberals can definitely agree on: the Atlantic slave trade was not immigration, and calling people in bondage workers is disingenuous.

McGraw-Hill doesn’t explain in the statement why they did this, but we can make an educated guess. Liberals support granting amnesty to people who enter and remain in our country illegally. The writer, editors, or both intended to tie black Americans and illegal aliens together as similar groups. As fellow immigrants, black Americans should support amnesty for the present generation of immigrants, right?

This framing is similar to comparing homosexual “marriage” to interracial marriage. Just as Dean-Burren spoke out against the slaves-as-immigrants narrative, more black Americans should get irate over having their skin color equated to deviant sexual behavior.