Student, mom reflect on aftermath of controversy
Last fall, Coby Burren, a 15-yearold freshman at Pearland High School, noticed a caption in his geography textbook that referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as workers instead of slaves.
He alerted his mother, Roni, and her subsequent Facebook video went viral and led to national news coverage. The book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill, offered to replace the book in Texas school districts, provide stickers with a rewritten caption or supply a free lesson plan on cultural sensitivity.
Coby Burren’s eventual goal is to study law or biochemistry in college while his mother is working on a doctorate from the University of Houston, focusing on the school-to-prison pipeline.
What are your reflections on the incident almost a year later? Roni: One of my more promi-
nent thoughts was this idea that this story matters to everyone. The idea that this skewed version of history doesn’t’ just matter to black people, but it matters to everyone from all countries of origin and walks of life.
Coby: I didn’t think it would matter to anyone under 21, but I saw that it did. As a student body, we see (misrepresentation of marginalized people) but never realized there was a way to really bring the issue to light.
What was the most frustrating part about the textbook situation?
Roni: It was frustrating hearing from people who wanted to just push this aside saying, ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s just a book. What are your motivations? Why are you doing this?’ The people who saw it that way argue the semantics of it all, but on no level do I want my ancestors to be considered just workers. We would never say the Native Americans on the Trail of Tears just went for a long walk or that they were joggers or marathoners.
Talk to me about erasure. I know McGraw-Hill said they’d adjust the term to ‘forced migration,’ but that still seems a bit lukewarm for the catalogue of atrocities being described.
Roni: It’s so cliché but when we can pretend and erase the ugliness in our past, then we can quite literally repeat it. The problem with erasure is that people can try to recreate the narrative and water it down or make it less atrocious. You can’t talk about Japanese internment camps and say ‘Well they were just campers. They just had to stay in a certain part of town,’ That opens up the door for someone like a Ted Cruz to say “Let’s police Muslim neighborhoods.”
I think McGraw’s change is better, but I still think we’re severely lacking in the way we tell the story of who we are and who we’ve been as a country. Our students don’t get a full view of the flaws in America’s past. We talk a lot about the bad things other countries have done and students have a good idea of that, but let’s look at how our country treated women or Latinos.
Coby: We don’t even have a lesson plan for them. I think it’s like two weeks for women’s history. Black history just comes in passing, like during the Civil War or Civil Rights Movement; as a byproduct but not as a primary topic.
Roni: It’s a conversation I don’t think we’re very willing to have, to acknowledge what really happened. It’d force you to confront things like white privilege or a conditioned fear of black people or assumptions that Asians or Latinos should do this or that.
Coby: I would add that a major classroom issue, from the perspective of a black male, is not having to read a book by a black author. I’ve only had to read books with black people in them, like “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
What do you miss in that?
Coby: You miss out on hearing about your culture. People of other ethnicities miss how to be culturally sensitive and miss what they might learn from other cultures. What helps racism in America is that in school you have almost no real requirement to be culturally sensitive for 18 years of your life. It’s harder to grasp that sensitivity as you get older if it was never really imprinted during your youth.
What do you make of revisionist history from a parental perspective?
Roni: It makes me upset. I pay taxes for good schools. It means I have to make sure I’m filling in the gaps and the sad part is that I can do that, but the parent working double shifts can’t and it’s not fair to ask them to.
I think the implication for black children is that it sends a message that they don’t matter. When you sit down and look at books that students have to read in elementary school, you don’t see stories of black people or Asian people or Hispanic children. Children of color feel like they’re literally in the margins.