Mom outraged school taped student’s wrists during slavery role play
A Southern California high school has come under fire recently for a history lesson about slavery in which students’ wrists were tied together and they were made to lie down in a dark room.
Sharde Carrington, whose son is in eighth grade at Whitney High Schoo in Cerritos, California, took to Facebook to express her outrage after receiving an email from a teacher titled “A Unique Classroom Activity.”
In the email, the teacher described a lesson in which teachers “will be acting as slave ship captains and your son/daughter will be pretending to be a slave.”
“Specifically, when class starts, we will sternly tell them to line up outside the room, use masking tape to ‘tie’ their wrists together, make them lay on the ground inside the room (which will be dark) should to shoulder with each other (boys and girls are in separate rows) and then while they lay there, have them watch a clip from the film ‘Roots,'” the email said.
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The lesson, according to the teacher, was designed to make students “uncomfortable and to feel mistreated, like a piece of property,” and parents were urged not to warn their children beforehand because it “is more powerful when it comes as a surprise.”
Carrington responded to the email by saying “Not my child,” before reaching out to the principal and the school counselor.
“As the mother of a black child, I feared that my son’s participation would lead him to experience trauma, perhaps at the cellular level, and have a visceral reaction of anger and fear during the exercise itself,” Carrington told the Huffington Post.
She argued, “Would you simulate rape in order to encourage sensitivity toward survivors? Will children pretend to be in Japanese internment camps as well?”
District superintendent Mary Sieu has since responded by telling Los Cerritos News that Whitney High Principal John Briquelet “recognizes that the times have changed since these exercises were developed” and will work with his teachers “to discontinue this exercise in the future and look for more updated lessons in regards to the slave history.”
