Awkward

The Washington Post recently posted a story about an embarrassing misstep from textbook publisher McGraw-Hill. Their World Geography textbook apparently includes the following 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.

When a student expressed his anger and discomfort with using the phrase "workers" to describe millions of enslaved people (which would imply they were compensated for their labor), and the story caught fire on social media, the publisher announced that the paragraph would be corrected in their next edition. This is why we hire editors, guys!