So, somewhere, someone proposed this idea, and other people said, “yes, that sounds like an excellent and educational idea.” Children from the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy (which seems to be a magnet school in a majority minority public school district, but I’m not 100% sure) went for a 3 day field trip last year to a place called “Nature’s Classroom” in Charlton, MA. The students were notified about an “optional” Underground Railroad Skit 30 minutes before it occurred, on the last night. There, according to testimony from a father filing suit on behalf of his 12-year-old daughter under the Civil Rights act (along with some more ordinary “damages” suits against the school board), this happened (her re-telling, via the father):
Before we went into the dark room, we were lined up outside and asked to imagine running with our families in Africa. The slave master finds us and beats, stabs, and kills my father in front of me. I went into a dark room where I had to sit on my bottom with my knees touching; my legs fell asleep and were hurting….the instructor told us,”we don’t need any sick slaves; if you get sick we will throw you overboard.” I was told that sharks were following us and could smell our blood.
So far so good, right? But here’s where a teachable moment–turned into a terrible catastrophe. No, jk obviously, this is the most insane horrible thing I’ve ever heard of! But it does get worse.
I was told [by the instructors] that I was nothing and that I was their property. I was told that if I were to run they would catch me and whip me till I bled on the floor, and then either cut my Achilles or hang me so I couldn’t run again. I was also told that if I taught another slave to write my tongue would be cut out so I couldn’t speak.
Well, long story short, terrified twelve-year-olds are running through the woods at night, being chased by their teachers, who are shouting ‘n**ger’ after them. Oh, yeah! They did! They went there. They went there, and brought slaves there, and made a town there, and then commenced to just live There, bald-faced like nobody’s business. “Yes, we went Here.” They would say. “What have you done with your life lately”–and then they would make a grand gesture around at the bustling activity of There, where skyscrapers were being erected by slaves at that very moment! They didn’t care what you said at all. They went There, and they did it up nice, and they are not moving home. Home wouldn’t even suit them nicely anymore.
Prior to this, a sharecropping outing at a cotton-processing plant in Montgomery County, Alabama had been the most racist field trip ever. NSFW both because it contains bad language and also because you will be weeping with laughter and that is likely to raise suspicion that you are not working hard. (I saw this in various comments at Jezebel, having missed it when it apparently made the rounds in 2010.) [The update below and change of video means I should summarize. An Alabama student describes how, as a third grader, he went to a local cotton processing plant with the rest of his class, and they were given little bags with smiling cotton puff people on them and told to pick as much cotton as they wanted, and they could keep it! They were, as he says, “singing songs and shit.” When they get back to the plant the plant managers and teachers said, ‘OK kids, turn in your bags.’ Annoyed, he stuffed a handful of cotton in his pocket. When his mom realized what it was, she wanted to know how he had gotten access to raw, unprocessed cotton, and when he explained, she went on a mission of righteous vengeance against the school, basically just giving them ten kinds of hell. A fellow Crimson Tide fan can be seen convulsed with laughter on the couch in the background.]
Do you all think that when the teachers kept the cotton at the end it was to teach the children a lesson about sharecropping, or were the people that ran that cotton processing plant such, well, soulless bastards that they took the cotton just to use? Also, the torch has been passed from Alabama to Massachusetts (?!). What brave state will take up the challenge, which will, I think have to involve at least one week of actual involuntary servitude?
UPDATED: Commenter Khan has brought it to my attention that the young man in the video didn’t expect it to achieve the viral success it did, and doesn’t want it to be up on YouTube anymore. While this isn’t possible, we can honor his request. I’ve switched the video to his explanation of why we should not look for his “sable visage” on the internet again. That’s too bad because he is an amazing and hilarious storyteller, but I’m sure we can all wish him success in his new chosen field.
{ 74 comments }
Meredith 09.24.13 at 6:49 am
Well, the torch has been passed (once again — good old cotton and mills, like sugar cane, molasses and rum — is the South even needed for that sugary triangle?) from Alabama to Hartford, CT, home of insurance and guns (though the relevance of state lines on these matters, guns esp. — Springfield and Enfield rifles, anyone? gets murky). So, murky continues. Charlton, MA and Hartford, CT, if I understand the post and links rightly. (Google Charlton — I had to, even though I live in MA and the town’s name is familiar to me from signs along the MA pike– looks prosperous and probably “well-intentioned liberal.” A lot of that in MA, of course.)
Highlights the problems of raising children, dunnit? How to nurture their imaginations and sympathies while grounding them in the shit that is everywhere in what has already happened? Twelve is a difficult age, yes it is, the age of the world most of the time. Those young men in the Alabama video — well, they are young men now, the black young man, looking back, certainly the son of a fierce mother. He shines.
Gotta have confidence in the resilience of children (and the fierceness of mothers).
Harald K 09.24.13 at 6:55 am
I’ve hated such “games” for ages. As a pen and paper role playing game enthusiast, I always heard that you should distinguish between your character and you. With D&D under Chick tract attack, this was very important for the RPG authors to emphasize. D&D distanced itself pretty strongly from “live” roleplaying in the version I read.
But obviously, when the “border guard” spits in your face, he actually spits in your face, not just your character’s. That is your teacher shouting “nigger” at you, not just a slaver shouting at your character. You don’t get any distance to what’s happening. It’s not a game, it’s crude indoctrination.
The charming thing, which reveals it as the indoctrination it is, is that it’s just as potent in unjust hands. For all its in-your-face immediacy, it’s still only reality as the scenario-maker sees it, not reality as it really is. You could easily design a game to really push people’s frustration buttons, where some had to work hard and others, “scroungers” or “immigrants” could steal their rewards with impunity. It would be damn effective, I tell you. Kids would walk away thinking they had learned something.
There are some authors I hate, because they try a little too hard to push the bodily fluids buttons. A certain late Swedish crime author, and a couple of very popular fantasy authors. But compared to games like this, they’re sophisticated and subtle.
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 7:19 am
Some kind of exercises along these lines could help sharpen people’s imaginations. I mean, “this is the amount of space you would be allowed to take up on a slave ship,” and then you’re required to stay in that space for 30 minutes or an hour. “The Middle Passage sucked!” you’d think. I always object to the great plantation homes in the Low Country that stand in a beautiful field surrounded by live oaks, when they really should have a favela in front full of slaves. But, um, someone really lost the plot here. I’m surprised they didn’t lose some kids outright, you can google the MA place and it’s big! My ass would be hiding in the woods for the rest of the night. Once your teachers have gone that far, who knows what they’ll do next? I would sooner have slept in the woods than gone back with those crazy people. I guess I don’t know how cold it was–not, I think.
adam.smith 09.24.13 at 7:47 am
so, I don’t really want to get into a big discussion about this, because I don’t have a strong connection to this but something sounds fishy. If I read this correctly they say they’ve been doing the same program for 20 years (it’s done by the nature classroom people, not by the teachers at HMTCA), presumably multiple times per year and there is one single family complaining in all that time? That can’t be right if things actually went down the way the parents/their daughter describe. Other people may not have sued, but they’d have had a similar reaction to Belle’s. The article doesn’t have a single statement from another parent or child. Given that the parents are suing (and so have a rather vested interest) and also given http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/09/elizabeth_loftus_interview_false_memory_research_on_eyewitnesses_child_abuse.html I’m, for the time being, skeptical that this actually happened anywhere close to as described.
Phil 09.24.13 at 8:14 am
You could easily design a game to really push people’s frustration buttons, where some had to work hard and others, “scroungers†or “immigrants†could steal their rewards with impunity. It would be damn effective, I tell you.
It’s been done. In fact it’s been done without the explicit button-pushing – simply saying “for the rest of the lesson, you five kids have authority over the other 25, and here are the things you can do” – and it works scarily well: within half an hour, the randomly-chosen ‘bosses’ feel superior, the randomly-chosen underlings feel cowed and guilty, and (in the absence of close supervision) bad stuff happens. What would happen if the choice of bosses and underlings was keyed to social divisions that people actually use to keep other people down… that’s a social experiment that would be unlikely to get research council funding.
adam.smith – good point. Here’s the Nature’s Classroom take on the story. How much of a difference does it make if they walked through the woods, or if use of the N-word wasn’t condoned, or if the activity was entirely optional? (I’d weight the last one very lightly indeed – an educational activity with all your peers and under the eyes of your teachers may be formally optional, but it’d be an unusual kid who took the option.)
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 8:28 am
I just watched the video for the nth time–I think my favorite part is: “we were singing songs and shit.”
Phil 09.24.13 at 8:57 am
That cracked me up, too. And I’ve got to say, I love those songs, but… man! Unbelievable.
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 9:02 am
adam.smith: Given that the parents are suing (and so have a rather vested interest)…
This can never be an appropriate standard by which to judge whether someone’s testimony has merit, can it? I mean, people who are the victims of serious crimes have ‘a rather vested interest’ in seeing that their assailants go to jail, but that can’t, in and of itself, constitute a good reason to doubt their testimony. Unless it’s a rape case. Hahaha, I totally had you going for a second, right guys! Ha. x__x No, but for real, if that happened to your kid, you would want to sue, and your desire to sue could hardly be taken as a piece of evidence that your suit was without merit. Everyone who wants to sue wants to sue.
Now, is the suit without merit? Again, the absolute first thing that happens, each and every single time anyone anywhere is accused of having done anything sexist or racist, ever, is that the internet lights up with discussions of how it’s logically impossible that such a thing took place. Not merely implausible or something. No. Impossible, because, in this case, if such a thing had ever happened, someone would have complained before. One wonders, under what conditions exactly can the first complaint occur? Is some sort of immaculate conception needed? In other cases, it was because Oprah didn’t speak Swiss or something. Since things that are racist and sexist happen a lot in real life, I’m inclined to believe people who say something racist or sexist happened to them, or to their child–because they didn’t pull her out of a desirable spot in that magnet school for no reason, probably. It sounds as if the people running the “skit” (here I wish I had some truly horrifying “scare” “‘quotes'” to put around ‘”‘skit'”‘, that would make you feel like someone poured ice water all down the back of your shirt, because those quotes were like watching The Ring but the Japanese version!!!) had good intentions, and were trying to help the children have a more vivid understanding of the horrors of slavery. But it’s easy to imagine the Underground Railroad skit going off the rails when a sensitive child who has been the victim of real, up-close and personal racism in her life comes up against an instructor who has thrown himself too enthusiastically into his role. And bringing up false memories of child abuse is just cold and unnecessary. This girl was telling her dad about something recent, and it happened 10 months ago when he testified.
And then we get to the ever-mystifying crux of it: “I’m, for the time being, skeptical that this actually happened anywhere close to as described.” Why? Why not be inclined to believe this kid? Or, if not, why not be agnostic? Just think, well, it could well have been as she said, or it could have been another way. Why do you actively want to doubt someone who says, “a fucked-up racist thing happened to my child.” Be agnostic, sure! Say, “well, I’d like to see more corroboration from other students, maybe we’ll hear that soon.” But right now you have the word of a school and a camp/learning center covering their asses, and you have the words of a 12-year-old girl who says she experienced something really terrifying and racist. Why does everybody want to jump up on there with the school board? Are the seats comfier? Does upholding the status quo get you 20% off on Amazon? What the fuck is it? I swear to God I will never understand this.
Harald K 09.24.13 at 9:29 am
Oh, I believe it. There’s a tremendous pressure to conform, and to rationalise away your discomfort as “learning”. I hated these programs since I first heard of them, and it was not optional, not even formally. Until I made it optional, by arguing loudly and getting angry and unpopular about it.
Belle, I think you are too forgiving of button pushers, and raging in a totally wrong direction here. Feel free to show me the size of the cell, but put me in there? No thanks. Empathy trainer, empathy train thyself. Engage my mind, don’t try to play on my emotions. There’s enough injustice in the world that if I should take it all in emotionally I’d be a cripple. Your case may be noble and just, but you do NOT have permission to try to bypass my critical distance by actually spitting in my face, actually locking me in a room, actually hitting me or whatever. Not if you’re my teacher, hell, not even if you’re my parent. If you want to teach respect, you show respect, there can be NO shortcuts.
Phil 09.24.13 at 10:10 am
But (Belle) the question isn’t “did this happen at all or is this silly girl making up a nasty story to discredit the poor well-meaning teachers?” Nobody’s saying that, not even the school itself. The question – at least, a question which I think is interesting – is (deep breath) “was what happened an aberration from a long-running program that nobody’s ever made a stink about before, perhaps involving individual staff members going over the line, perhaps involving some exaggeration in the telling – and if this was the case, was the program that nobody ever complained about (at least not loudly) actually pretty unacceptable in itself, when you look at it, so that the girl and her Dad have done us all a favour by shining a light on it, even if not every detail of their story turns out to be both accurate and representative?” OK, that’s two questions.
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 10:19 am
Harald: I agree no one should be spitting in anyone’s face or locking anyone in a room, ever, or putting someone in a dark closet, ever. I thought that went without saying, but I guess this is the Internet. I just know a lot of privileged white people in the South who believe a whole raft of bullshit about “Africans were enslaving people first,” and “everybody did it,” and on and on. I can imagine it having been a useful exercise for those kids to picture what it would really be like, just by drawing a space around them on the floor with masking tape and going, “that’s it. That’s all the space you would get.” I only meant that, or something along those lines.
krippendorf 09.24.13 at 10:22 am
FWIW, other students who went to the same program have said that it was not at all like the suit describes it. (I stumbled onto the relevant site in my morning’s web meandering a week or so ago and didn’t save the link.) I have no way to judge whose recollections are more accurate or the motivations of the parties involved.
I sometimes wonder what proportion of my students hear “colored person” when I say “person of color” in a lower-division lecture on race. (Or tweet it as “colored person.” One fewer character, after all.) Very similar linguistically, but a world of difference in cultural meaning and presumed intent. And, it’s pretty easy to see how this could blow up into “my professor is racist.”
Khan 09.24.13 at 11:06 am
Allow me to stop lurking long enough for a quick FYI: the guy in that video had it taken down, but not fast enough to stop clones (including your link) from popping up. I have no idea if he still cares at this late date. [Insert observation about the Streisand Effect here.]
bill benzon 09.24.13 at 11:14 am
Maybe the kids should go Hansel and Gretel on the teachers, stick ’em in ovens for a couple of hours.
Random Lurker 09.24.13 at 11:38 am
My first reaction from the OP was: Hey, it would be a great teaching course for a 16+ old student, but they were crazy doing this to 12 years old students.
I say this because I can’t understand either from the comments or from the OP if this is the point also for Belle and the other commenters or if they think that it was a racist thing done on purpose and/or it would be wrong regardless to the age of the students.
@Harald K 1
I play roleplayng games since I was 12, and I thank you for the link – at first I believed it was parody (I knew that such campaign existed but I never read any real material of this sort).
Rmj 09.24.13 at 12:07 pm
It’s been done. In fact it’s been done without the explicit button-pushing – simply saying “for the rest of the lesson, you five kids have authority over the other 25, and here are the things you can do†– and it works scarily well: within half an hour, the randomly-chosen ‘bosses’ feel superior, the randomly-chosen underlings feel cowed and guilty, and (in the absence of close supervision) bad stuff happens. What would happen if the choice of bosses and underlings was keyed to social divisions that people actually use to keep other people down… that’s a social experiment that would be unlikely to get research council funding.
And I’m always left wondering: does that change you for the rest of your life? Or do you remember it kind of like that project you did where you made a model of an atom, or the solar system, or a volcano? Do you grow up, in other words, aware of power structures and hierarchies and the problems of authority? Or do you grow into society as it is, find your place, and make yourself as comfortable as you can?
I made an Aztec pyramid out of sugar cubes once. Don’t remember a damned thing now about Aztecs or their pyramids, but I do remember that stupid project.
Rmj 09.24.13 at 12:12 pm
Now, is the suit without merit? Again, the absolute first thing that happens, each and every single time anyone anywhere is accused of having done anything sexist or racist, ever, is that the internet lights up with discussions of how it’s logically impossible that such a thing took place. Not merely implausible or something. No. Impossible, because, in this case, if such a thing had ever happened, someone would have complained before.
From a lawyer’s perspective: this is the problem with “trying” a suit in the court of public opinion. You don’t know what the evidence is (not facts, “evidence.” There’s a difference in law.). So you fill in the blanks with suppositions, either that it can’t be true, or it must all be true.
In a courtroom it might (rarely) all be false; but it’s never all true. Except in TeeVee courtroom, of course; where it has to end in 60 minutes, too; or 45, counting commercials.
Ben Alpers 09.24.13 at 12:28 pm
My Jewish summer camp had a similar, horrific unannounced Holocaust-education “skit” (though I don’t remember anyone using that word) in which we all spent a lovely night hiding in the woods from mysterious, antisemitic attackers. These real-world versions of the Schartz -Metterklume Method are just inexcusible.
Phil 09.24.13 at 1:28 pm
Ha. More like the Unrest-Cure.
Rob in CT 09.24.13 at 1:34 pm
Woah. Not feeling terribly proud of my alma matter today. Trincoll, I AM DISAPPOINT.
Mao Cheng Ji 09.24.13 at 1:41 pm
I understand why some may consider this reenactment insensitive or inappropriate – but racist?
Rob in CT 09.24.13 at 1:41 pm
My Jewish summer camp had a similar, horrific unannounced Holocaust-education “skit†(though I don’t remember anyone using that word) in which we all spent a lovely night hiding in the woods from mysterious, antisemitic attackers. These real-world versions of the Schartz -Metterklume Method are just inexcusible.
I find this flabbergasting. I could maybe see doing something where you reverse the roles… as adults or at least high school age, and even then I really don’t know. It’s impossible to do it right. We have books and movies, and maybe they’re enough.
alkali 09.24.13 at 2:00 pm
Well, long story short, terrified twelve-year-olds are running through the woods at night, being chased by their teachers, who are shouting ‘nigger’ after them.
This is not in the father’s statement before the board linked above.
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 2:23 pm
alkali: It’s in the news report linked to in the OP.
William Timberman 09.24.13 at 2:40 pm
Though this be method, yet there’s madness in’t. The duties of a cultural critic are never-ending, and stuff like this is a good reason why. I’d rather have my fingernails torn out with pliers than attempt to disentangle all the threads that were woven into this mishegoss. Fortunately, there’s Belle to sort them out….
Belle Waring 09.24.13 at 2:47 pm
William Timberman, are you being real nice, or sarcastic fake nice? I’m going to figure real nice, since I have to go to bed now.
Cian 09.24.13 at 2:55 pm
I tend to be skeptical of anything I read in the media, particularly if I’m inclined to believe the story. In my experience the media rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story. If a story sounds sensational, that may simply be because it has been tweaked for ratings.
On whether this happened. Phil pretty much sums up my opinion. Even if the intentions were good – seriously? I mean maybe if this was reform camp for redactivist racists…
William Timberman 09.24.13 at 3:08 pm
Belle @ 26
Well, I never truly know what my subconscious is up to, but as far as my conscious mind is concerned, that was definitely NOT sarcasm. Horrible stuff like this is often passed off as so we made a little mistake, no need to overreact, or passed over without comment by people like me who shake their heads in dismay, but find the idea of explaining exactly what’s wrong with it too daunting. I really am glad that there’s someone out there who’s up to taking such ghastly things on. Honest.
alkali 09.24.13 at 3:18 pm
@24: I see that. It is odd to me that the father’s statement before the board does not include several of the most alarming things asserted in the news report. Why would he omit them?
Benquo 09.24.13 at 3:39 pm
Belle Waring at 8:
Presumably some time during the previous 19 years of the program’s operati0n.
It seems much more likely that this was a case of things getting badly out of hand one night, than that it was all part of someone’s sick plan as you imply in your opening sentence:
Of course, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big deal. It looks like Nature’s Classroom is rightly at least pretending to take the claim seriously:
On the other hand, this claim is possibly bullshit:
Unless we know in exactly what words the students were informed of this, how much of the details of the program were disclosed in advance, and how frequently students were explicitly given the opportunity to opt out (or better yet, to opt in), we don’t really know how consensual this was. These were kids. Even grownups sometimes go along with things and accidentally do things that get counted as implicit consent because they don’t think they have a choice. (Cf. interactions with police, and the importance of the questions “Am I free to go?” and “Am I being detained?”)
Rmj 09.24.13 at 3:46 pm
But it’s easy to imagine the Underground Railroad skit going off the rails when a sensitive child who has been the victim of real, up-close and personal racism in her life comes up against an instructor who has thrown himself too enthusiastically into his role.
Also, unfortunately, easy to imagine that actually happened: but did it?
I have the father’s statement to the board (which is not “testimony,” no matter how he wants to label it; it is simply a statement) which must be subject to cross-examination before it can be accepted as a true statement of the facts.
Nature’s Classroom (linked above) has so far, they say, not found any evidence to support the father’s statement. Which only proves this issue is in controversy, not that the father is wrong or Nature’s Classroom is wrong.
Which leads me back to the first question I always ask in these situations: “What happened?” Until I know the answer to that question, I can’t say how dreadful (or not) this was, or if the child is suffering from false memories due to abuse (another suggestion, in earlier comments), or even if anything actually happened.
‘Twould be dreadful, ’twere true; but is it true?
adam.smith 09.24.13 at 3:51 pm
Belle,
you’re not agnostic either. You’re writing as if you’re 100% convinced that things happened as described, based on one single source. I make no such claims.
I’m also wondering, given you admonition yesterday about talking to real people whether the tirade directed at me, which nicely groups me with racism/sexism apologists is how you would have answered me at a dinner table. The people you attack here – in my case as being complicit in racism – are real people, too.
I believe racist (and sexist) things happen all the time. That still doesn’t mean I have to throw all other priors out of the window when judging the plausibility of claims that something racist happened. As krippendorf @12 has pointed out, there are other participants disputing this is how the `skit’ happened (though it’s not clear to me whether those participated in the same program or the exact same trip). I give specific reasons for being skeptical: There are, per the description, dozens of eye-witnesses. Given the demographics of HTMCA she was likely not the only black kid (if I’m wrong about that I think her account is more plausible), I find it odd that neither did anyone join the lawsuit nor did anyone confirm the basic outline of the description of what happened to the journalist. I don’t expect an immaculate conception of racism accusations, but given social norms in the US I find it implausible that you can yell the N word diverse groups of kids for 20 years in a liberal, Northern state and never get a complaint. We (or at least I) make such plausibility assessments all the time when looking at racism/sexism cases and they frequently turn out the other way: DSK’s story about what happened in his NYC hotel room seemed/seems highly implausible to me, as does Frank Zimmerman’s account of what happened before he shot Trayvon Martin.
I have an open mind about this – my worldview isn’t going to crumble if it turns out some educators in MA did something racist – but given what I’ve been able to read so far I think skepticism is a reasonable conclusion.
adam.smith 09.24.13 at 4:00 pm
btw. I emphatically want to say that I did _not_ mean to suggest the kid was abused by linking to the article about false memories. The article – and Loftus work in general – describes how easy it is to implant false memories that people then believe to have actually happened. This can happen very quickly and doesn’t require any type of abuse to occur (abuse cases are just particularly high profile).
I was more thinking along the lines: Daughter comes home, tells parents about the ‘re-enactment,’ parents don’t like the sound of it, ask a couple of suggestive questions which influence how the daughter remembers what actually happened. There has to be no malevolence involved at all.
Phil 09.24.13 at 4:09 pm
Given the demographics of HTMCA she was likely not the only black kid (if I’m wrong about that I think her account is more plausible)
I’d never considered that possibility – that she was the only Black kid involved – but that would make the dynamics really unpleasant. Reminds me of a local mother who took her son out of school because she was disgusted at the racist filth they were being forced to read in the name of English Literature… which turned out to be To Kill a Mockingbird. Then the additional detail came out that the boy was the only non-White in his class, and the story started to look a bit different. Kids in groups can be nasty – they’ll use whatever’s to hand.
Manta 09.24.13 at 7:05 pm
I mostly agree with adam.smith take.
I would like to have some help calibrating my bullshit detector: can we review this episode in a couple of months, when hopefully more information will be available, and check which view more actually describe to the actual facts?
Contra adam, my view of the world would change if proven wrong, but mostly in relation on how to judge news.
Shatterface 09.24.13 at 7:18 pm
I understand why some may consider this reenactment insensitive or inappropriate – but racist?
My thoughts too. Tasteless, certainly. Traumatic, possibly. But calling it racist gives it a political dimension that carries more weight with some than ‘merely’ scaring the shit out of young children.
A useful test of how racist this programme is would be to compare the children’s beliefs and attitudes before and after the trip. I’m guessing not many came away with a more positive attitude to slavery.
C. Van Carter 09.24.13 at 7:43 pm
This school also promotes Satanism:
http://hmtcamediacenter.weebly.com/
Billikin 09.24.13 at 8:15 pm
Sadistic is the word that comes to my mind.
Adults kidding themselves that the way to instill empathy in children for the oppressed is for them to act out the oppression on the children.
dbk 09.24.13 at 8:17 pm
@15 and others who noted the age-inappropriacy of this slavery re-enactment:
Re-enactments are toxic at any age, including the 16+ suggested above as more appropriate.
I saw the 2008 (German) version of The Wave (Die Welle) a couple years ago, and was cured of ever believing re-enactments served any useful “educational” purpose. As a mere viewer I was terrified – as a participant, I don’t think I’d have made it to the end of the “experiment.”
GeoX 09.24.13 at 8:18 pm
Huh. As an elementary school student, I went to this place several times in the late-eighties-early-nineties, or at least to *a* three-day nature program called Nature’s Classroom. Certainly, nothing remotely like this ever happened while I was there, which is not of course to say it couldn’t have later.
dbk 09.24.13 at 8:29 pm
And on a related note:
has the ever-vigilant CT readership noted that Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (frequently listed as one of the 100 greatest American novels) has been officially banned in Randolph County, North Carolina?
What is going on in North Carolina? (genuine question; my grandmother hailed from Rutherford County, NC and I’ve always been curious about the state and its inhabitants).
Substance McGravitas 09.24.13 at 9:04 pm
The reason for banning the Ellison book is interesting. I gather the Board is in the middle of reading every book on the school shelves. They should be mighty smart by the end of it!
adam.smith 09.24.13 at 9:07 pm
It’s basically impossible to actually ban books in the US. The book was removed from public school libraries in Randolph County. Stuff like that happens with some frequency across the US, here’s a list: http://theweek.com/article/index/249922/americas-most-surprising-banned-books
This is a result of the decentralization of educational decision-making, combined with the fact that Christianist crazies have been very good at getting themselves onto school boards as well as the fact that Christianist crazies are regionally concentrated. Sometimes the outcry is big enough for the school board to become embarrassed and reconsider, sometimes it’s not.
emjaybee 09.24.13 at 11:03 pm
In the 80s we went to a Christian camp in the woods of east Texas. The last night of camp, we played…I shit you not…”Gestapo.” You see, we were the “good Christians of the resistance” (guess being Jews was out) and the counselors were the Nazis. Our goal was not to get caught while running through dark woods filled with counselor/Nazis, where there were also some booby traps in the form of mud pits/water balloons. If caught by a Nazi, you were asked “Are you a Christian?” If you answered yes, you went to “jail” which was the fenced area around the pool. “No” you were let go. Being as it was a Christian camp and we’d spent all week loving Jesus, few had the guts to say no.
The camp’s still there, for all I know they still play this game. I never told my folks about it. But I have no trouble believing this girl’s story.
adam.smith 09.24.13 at 11:03 pm
turns out, it is actually banned book week this week, so here’s a longer list: http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics
Belle Waring 09.25.13 at 12:47 am
Hi adam.smith–OK that’s a fair point. I apologize. It’s not polite to go flying off the handle calling people racist, so, I’m sorry. I’m always inclined to take the word of the alleged victim in a situation like this, in part because a great deal of people are always going to take the other side quite automatically. I am aware of how easily false memories can be induced, but again, this just seems like kind of a reach when a more parsimonious explanation is at hand, namely, someone got a little too into her role as slave-master and fucked up, frightening the children in her care seriously. I mean, you can read in this thread stories from people who have had similarly weird/ill-advised educational games thrown at them; surely you don’t think false memories have been induced in these commenters, right? And everyone admits an exercise like this took place, right? So the question is just, did one of the instructors fuck up further what was already a really age-inappropriate exercise? It seems not implausible.
adam.smith 09.25.13 at 12:58 am
fair enough, thanks. I’ll just leave it at that, don’t think I have anything meaningful to add.
Rmj 09.25.13 at 1:09 am
It is the father’s word that this is what his daughter told him.
Is what he says true?
I have had more than a little experience with people telling me stories I am supposed to believe, even inclined to believe. And heard stories about me, stories I knew were lies.
Were they plausible? Yes. Were they true and trustworthy? Seldom. In the case of the lies, not at all.
Better, I have found, to suspend judgment.
parsimon 09.25.13 at 1:42 am
I see the thread has moved on, but: Belle at 8: Why does everybody want to jump up on there with the school board?
I don’t think it’s the case that “everybody” does.
This has been reported fairly widely; it’s great that Belle brought it here to CT, whose denizens may not have heard of it, but it’s not the case that it’s gone unremarked or excused.
Melissa Harris-Perry had an extended panel discussion this past weekend, including as participants the parents bringing suit against the school, should anyone care to see and hear their expressed thoughts. Harris-Perry’s principal point was that empathy can be taught without taking the student through the experienced event, that we should apply the same standards of concern to young people as we would to adults, and that just as one can and should gain empathy for victims of rape or pogroms without being subjected to pretend versions of those things, so it is with slavery.
If the events (and let’s not call it a ‘skit’) at Nature’s Classroom went down as alleged, what’s racist about it is any notion that enslavement is not just as traumatic an experience as, say, rape. Or the events of the Holocaust. Teaching methods really don’t need to come close to re-enactment, because we have testimony from victims, photographs and written words, and survivors who continue to speak and have recorded their experiences.
Doctor Memory 09.25.13 at 2:20 am
Okay, so obviously if the exercise in the OP went down as the father described, it was ludicrously inappropriate on every possible level, possibly rising to the standard of criminal negligence, reckless endangerment or even assault and battery…
But there’s a small part of me that thinks: good. So much of the American dialogue on slavery, especially as it’s presented in primary schools, is white-washed, ahistorical, anodyne bullshit: “The Day the Clown Cried” dressed down for third-graders. A strong association of “slavery” and “systemic racism” with “pants-shitting terror, fear and discomfort” is not necessarily a bad thing to inoculate young (and especially young white) kids with. It also has the advantage of being, historically, accurate.
Collin Street 09.25.13 at 2:20 am
People whose words are trusted have less of an incentive to tell the truth, because their risk of being detected lying [and of suffering the negative consequences of being condemned as a liar] is less.
Now, if they’re deserving of the trust then this doesn’t matter, because they won’t be lying regardless. But…
[incidentally, if you suspend judgement that doesn’t mean you ignore the claim, because that is in and of itself a judgement. If you suspend judgement then that means you treat the story as if it might be true… and the correct path if you believe that children may have been traumatised by the deliberately-chosen actions of unrelated adults is normally to remove any children from the authority of those adults as a precautionary measure until you have a clearer idea, no?]
Also, I think that Carthage should be destroyed.
Collin Street 09.25.13 at 2:27 am
But that wasn’t something that just happened: the fragmentation of authority in the US is a deliberate decision, to render it difficult to actually change anything [because to change things you need to get all the authorities lined up simultaneously]. Same reason that so many offices are filled by direct election rather than appointment.
Main Street Muse 09.25.13 at 2:45 am
To DBK @41 re: NC – I moved to NC two years ago from IL (from one extreme to another, alas!)
NC (to me, a newbie to the state) is a Tea Party case study. For the first time in about a century, the GOP owns the state house, senate and governor’s office. They are drunk with power.
They’ve floated the idea of a state religion. They’ve passed legislation allowing guns in bars, on campuses (in a car trunk), and in parks. They’ve slashed education funding yet claim it’s the biggest education budget ever. They’ve passed what some call is the most restrictive voter ID bill in the country. They’ve shut down pretty much every abortion clinic in the state by making them conform to surgical center regulations. They are contemplating “forced tracking” – where homeowners will be forced to sell natural gas to for-profit fracking companies. All this done, the NCGOP says, as part of their focus on jobs development. (NC has one of the worst unemployment rates in the nation.) They’ve rejected Medicaid expansion and recently turned down two federal grants that would help with environmental testing. They’ve gone mad.
I miss the Land of Lincoln, laden as it is with all that unfunded pension debt. Even Rahm Emanuel seems more sane than the loonies here in the Tarheel state.
parsimon 09.25.13 at 3:13 am
Doctor Memory at 50: But there’s a small part of me that thinks: good. So much of the American dialogue on slavery, especially as it’s presented in primary schools, is white-washed, ahistorical, anodyne bullshit: “The Day the Clown Cried†dressed down for third-graders. A strong association of “slavery†and “systemic racism†with “pants-shitting terror, fear and discomfort†is not necessarily a bad thing to inoculate young (and especially young white) kids with. It also has the advantage of being, historically, accurate.
I had to walk through this slowly without upset. There is a very definite difference between the ways that white kids know of racism and the way black kids do. Obviously. White kids should certainly be given to understand what’s going on, and has gone on, and it’s something they’re less likely to be aware of.
Hrm, would you think that white kids should have a re-enactment experience of enslavement? But black kids shouldn’t? Or do black kids don’t get it yet, either, without such a re-enactment?
Serious question.
Belle Waring 09.25.13 at 3:16 am
parsimon: it’s not me calling it a skit. The educational camp called it an “Underground Railroad Skit” in their descriptions and promotional material to the family. I think it’s necessary to report on that. Doctor Memory: the student is a black girl in a town that’s majority minority but has some magnet schools that, as far as I can tell, have a disproportionate number of white students, if you see what I mean. As a white parent, you’re likely to be sending your kid to this school or a private school.
parsimon 09.25.13 at 3:29 am
Belle: I wasn’t saying you were responsible for calling it a skit. A number of other commenters were going with it.
Did you have a chance to watch the Melissa Harris-Perry segment? I thought you might be relieved to see some somber discussion.
Doctor Memory 09.25.13 at 3:29 am
parsimon@54: it’s a fair question. I can only say that I have yet to meet any black people (and to be sure, I claim no exhaustive survey here, and those I know are surely a self-selected group) who weren’t already via their parents made extremely well aware of the realities of slavery (much like any of my grandparents’ generation would spit fire and blood on the top of Germany), and who weren’t already, via the actions of basically every adult around them, just as well aware of the realities of institutional racism.
It’s also a given that whatever my pedagogical fantasies might hypothetically approve of, in real life the scenario described was just a terrible idea from beginning to end.
Belle: I am abjectly embarrassed to say that that I had not clicked through to the original story and learned that the family suing were black themselves. Mea culpa.
Doctor Memory 09.25.13 at 3:39 am
(er, “on the topic of Germany.”)
parsimon 09.25.13 at 3:46 am
Doc Memory, if you hadn’t realized the family and student in question were black, er … okay, you misunderstood. My question remains, I think (though I don’t have a huge stake in it at this point): should white students experience a re-enactment of enslavement in order to make them understand?
I was about to say that this was not much more than an academic point, but it occurs to me that if most of the past participants in the Nature’s Classroom program were white, it’s less likely that they’d have found anything to freak out about, because it is not real to them. So not as surprising if no one said anything previously. They didn’t understand that this was a re-enactment of something real.
Bruce McCulley 09.25.13 at 3:57 am
adam.smith @ 4 & 33:
Elizabeth Loftus’s work in this field has generated a good deal of controversy. See, for instance http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/lg/taus.html
Doctor Memory 09.25.13 at 4:03 am
Parsimon: I would change that around a little bit and merely say that white students should be made to understand the realities of slavery. I’m agnostic as to method, and in my calmer moods suspect, as you do, that role-playing exercises can be just as easily ignored as lectures by people who have, pardon the phrase, no skin in the game.
parsimon 09.25.13 at 4:19 am
Doc Memory: Comity.
Zamfir 09.25.13 at 4:44 am
Dr Mem, even as a pedagogical fantasy, I am somewhat skeptical that it would reliably work as you hope it might work. You can induce terror in kids and plan that they make the association you intend them to make, but you can’t really control that. If you play with gut level fear, you’ll get gut level associations.
Like, ‘thank god I am not black’. Guilt-tinged perhaps, but still. It’s generally easier for people associate with the powerful than with victims, and this scenario seems made for it. Or alternatively, even simultaneously, an association that black people are looking for retribution. You didn’t do anything, they still made you go through the terror exercise. Like Obama, you know.
I bet that it’s hard to tailor a terrorize-kids program in a way that only the virtuous associations remain…
PJW 09.25.13 at 5:04 am
I wonder if they do Milgram experiment reenactments in science class.
Random Lurker 09.25.13 at 8:14 am
@parsimon 54
There is a very definite difference between the ways that white kids know of racism and the way black kids do. Obviously. White kids should certainly be given to understand what’s going on, and has gone on, and it’s something they’re less likely to be aware of.
Hrm, would you think that white kids should have a re-enactment experience of enslavement? But black kids shouldn’t? Or do black kids don’t get it yet, either, without such a re-enactment?
Serious question.
From my point of view, “racism” and “slavery” are a very different thing (though related in american history). From that point of view, I think that both white and black people (certainly white me included) could gain something by a similar exercise, though it is possible that the costs are higer than the gains.
I don’t agree with the idea that whites “don’t understand” racism, or that males “don’t understand” what it means to be a woman in a sexist society. If this was true, then also black couldn’t understand what it means to be white, and thus couldn’t really appreciate the extent of racism (they could have an iflated view of it for example); ditto for women.
But in reality, people understand quite well the point of view of others, the difference is that usually those in the group in power don’t care that much about those of the group out of power (or rationalize the situation), but this is different from the idea that “whites don’t understand” etc. .
eddie 09.25.13 at 11:28 am
Could this lawsuit set a precedent for reparations for real victims’ families?
Katherine 09.25.13 at 11:35 am
I have had more than a little experience with people telling me stories I am supposed to believe, even inclined to believe.
The same surely applies to the education centre as to the father of the child, but this thread is full of people doubting his word rather than theirs. Even though they have more reason to smudge the actuality than he does.
Frowner 09.25.13 at 5:53 pm
I know someone who teaches at the university level who – well, this person did not create a scary and racist skit as a learning exercise – created an entirely well-meaning activity around responses to a controversial mural that was actually pretty distressing for their students of color. (The mural in question was one that depicted, among other events in the institution’s history, the activities of the KKK. The intent was to recognize that this institution was not innocent of racism and that racism was inextricably part of its history, but the actual effect was that students of color got to walk past a depiction of the KKK every day).
The point is, the person I know created an activity which involved students sharing their responses to the mural in a way that ended up pretty much isolating the students of color in the class, who then felt bad and were pretty angry, partly because it was unpleasant and isolating and partially because the activity treated something intense, personal and lived for them as the subject for…well really, almost an academic game.
The person I know was, of course, horrified and dismayed and has repeatedly reflected on this as part of improving their teaching practice.
Having heard about that activity from this person, I have no trouble at all believing that this nature learning place could have produced something pretty gruesome with only the best and most sincere intentions. I also have no trouble believing that a kid being chased through the woods at night in an unfamiliar place after hearing some really intense, shattering rhetoric might experience that chase as more frightening, faster-paced and more intense than the person who was familiar with the territory and had scripted the activity. Poor kid.
I am basically against reenactment-as-moral-education, because it can always and only trivialize the original situation (for people it does not trigger) and cause present-day misery and discomfort (for those it does). If anything, for me as a white person knowing all the while that I would not have been enslaved, my relatives were not slaves and I do not suffer from systemic racism in the present, a reenactment reduces slavery to a charade, a school activity, something I must play at for a grade. If I’m particularly obtuse, I imagine that I have “insight” into the situation of actual slaves, a sort of Black-Like-Me-lite.
I also think that deep and well-developed empathy is difficult and takes time. You can’t do a shortcut via running around in the woods. I was a mushy soft-hearted liberal even as a pretty young kid, but I would not say that I had the ability to even sorta-kinda imagine the situation of slavery. I think I have more of a developed sense of the pervasive brutal grinding horror and misery now as an adult, but I know that as a relatively sheltered kid I just didn’t have the life experience or cognitive skills to understand just how bad really bad things can be.
And then of course, no one ever does reenactments of slave resistance, right? If we’re going to reenact, let’s reenact the Combahee River raid or Nat Turner or people learning to read in secret, or even just people doing life things to get through the day.
Also, I think that when you live a life relatively free of systemic oppression, it’s easy not to understand how powerful and triggering words or experiences can be, and how that’s different from finding something unpleasant or cruel-sounding or hard to hear. I would say that I did not realize how bad experiences can produce such powerful responses until I was in a couple of activist situations where friends were held at gunpoint by police and where I was on the periphery of some Not That Great stuff. I wasn’t scared at the time because it seemed pretty unreal and I’m not scared when I recount what happened – but if I see footage of riots or police violence I cry and shake and can’t control it even if I’m in company. It’s genuinely bizarre and out of proportion to my conscious feelings, but it’s something that has persisted for years. My point being that if someone had experienced racism, even if they felt totally cool-headed in the moment and feel like they’ve moved on, I would not be at all surprised that being dropped into a reenactment of racism could be really intense, scary, triggering and out-of-control-feeling. Which is one of the reasons that I think these types of educational things are a bad idea.
dsquared 09.25.13 at 7:09 pm
I say this because I can’t understand either from the comments or from the OP if this is the point also for Belle and the other commenters or if they think that it was a racist thing done on purpose and/or it would be wrong regardless to the age of the students.
there’s just this moment in every teacher’s career, when you’re charging through a forest in the middle of the night, screaming the n-word at a group of terrified twelve-year-olds, when you think “is this right? Is this what I got into education for?“. I have this pet theory that the answer you give to yourself when you ask that question can say a lot about your character.
between4walls 09.25.13 at 11:43 pm
Adding to what GeoX said- I went to Nature’s Classroom as a ten-year-old in 2003, had a great time, and nothing like this happened. I don’t remember well enough to know if there was any Underground Railroad activity, but certainly there were no insults or threats of violence during any activity I attended.
The graphic threats described go well beyond the acceptable limits of an activity for elementary schoolers, and it’s to hear something like this happened at a program that was such a great experience for me.
Dr. Hilarius 09.26.13 at 6:57 am
Bruce McCully @ 60: the source you cite is one with a strong bias and their recitation of the case is beyond misleading. Loftus prevailed on 20 of 21 allegations on pre-trial motions and the case settled on the 21st with a $7500 nuisance settlement to the plaintiff. Ms. Taus was obligated to pay the defendant’s legal fees (around $250,00) as they had prevailed on almost every count. See http://www.csicop.org/si/show/whatever_happened_to_jane_doe/ for a summary. Loftus and her co-author were cleared of ethical wrong-doing by their respective universities.
Random Lurker 09.26.13 at 10:04 pm
@dsquared 69
“there’s just this moment in every teacher’s career, when you’re charging through a forest in the middle of the night, screaming the n-word at a group of terrified twelve-year-olds”
Now I realize what was my real vocation, unfortunately many years too late.
adc 09.27.13 at 5:25 pm
This whole thing is awful but fascinating.. A quick Google search turned up the following:
A 2009 blog post from a 6th grader who narrates the experience in a way that makes it sound fun and safe- which is itself fairly messed up- yearbook signing: “pretending to be enslaved was the best! always remember it lol!”
http://naturesclassroom09.blogspot.com/
This “info packet,” which bills the underground railroad as their most popular activity and suggests it plays best in the evening..
http://www.naturesclassroom.com/PDFs/09%20Info%20PacketPDF.pdf
Also a relatively balanced discussion (though I skimmed it), opening with the report that this activity has attracted controversy before: http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-33-spring-2008/feature/classroom-simulations-proceed-caution
These stunts seem, at best, difficult to carry out well, like pitching a perfect game. At worst, they’re perverse. Personally I think it’s eerie that 50 percent of exiting students call the Underground Railroad exercise the best part of the trip- I may know too few 12 year olds, or underestimate them, but from what I remember of that age, I doubt they’re reflecting deeply on the moral implications of what happened, and are more likely to think the whole thing was ‘awesome’, fun, like a haunted house.
adc 09.27.13 at 5:49 pm
Will also add that labeling the activity “Underground Railroad” is totally misleading, because the re-enactment seems to have nothing to do with the risky, benevolent act of sheltering escaped slaves.. It’s like calling a re-enactment “Ride the Panama Canal!” when you have to pretend to work for an hour and then die of malaria.
Can’t they just have everyone play ‘Oregon Trail’? That brings out plenty of sadistic impulses anyway, and in a much safer space.
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