Teachers acted as slave ship captains and taped 8th graders’ wrists for lesson on slavery
A high school in Cerritos, California, has become the target of fierce criticism online after a mother revealed that her eighth grade son’s history teacher planned to teach him and his classmates about slavery by taping their wrists, forcing them to lie on the ground and pretending to be a slave ship captain.
Shardé Carrington said she received an email from her son’s history teacher at Whitney High School several weeks ago about a “unique classroom activity,” as the subject line put it.
In the email, the teacher wrote that three educators “will be teaching our students about the slave system in colonial America.”
“In order to help students understand the psychological impact of slavery on Africans brought over to this country, all of us do a simulation activity in our classrooms that tries to recreate the voyage that slaves went on across the Atlantic Ocean, on their way to the New World.”
As part of this simulation, the teachers would act as slave ship captains, beginning class by ordering students to line up outside the room, binding their wrists with masking tape, making them lie on the ground of the darkened classroom and watch a clip from the 1977 miniseries “Roots,” according to screenshots of the email posted on Facebook by Carrington.
Towards the end of the email, the teacher reportedly urges parents to “NOT TELL YOUR CHILD ABOUT THIS” in order that it be more surprising and shocking to students.
Carrington, who is black, wrote to school administrators, she told HuffPost, questioning the exercise’s effectiveness in properly and respectfully conveying the horrors of slavery. She called the idea “irresponsible at best, manipulative and dangerous at worst.”
The department chair for social studies at the school emailed Carrington back, according to screenshots, saying he had introduced the exercise roughly a decade ago and defending it as part of a “nationally recognized supplier of curriculum designed to bring experiences into the classroom versus just discussions.”
CBS Los Angeles confirmed with older students at the school that they had also underwent the same experience.
“You definitely don’t need to pretend to be a slave, but it was another hands on experiment used to simulate slavery,” student Kaleem Syed told the station. “Definitely not an effective way and there’s better alternatives than that.”
Carrington posted images of the emails on Facebook last Tuesday. Since then, the school went ahead with the exercise, but Carrington said she had her son pulled from the classroom beforehand, per HuffPost.
According to the Education Data Partnership, Whitney High School had 15 black students out of 1,011 total in 2016-2017. Carrington told HuffPost that none of the teachers in charge of the lesson are African-American.
This story was originally published September 20, 2017 at 1:45 PM with the headline "Teachers acted as slave ship captains and taped 8th graders’ wrists for lesson on slavery."