Student Humiliated by Mock Slave Auction at Ohio School

[homasse]

Student Humiliated by Mock Slave Auction at Ohio School

Click to view

According to The Root, 10-year old student Nikko Burton was humiliated by his teacher during a mock “slave auction” at Chapelfield Elementary in Ohio. Burton, one of two black students in the class, was chosen to be a “slave,” while other students role-played as “masters” who inspected the

Comments

[imissimissyou]

poor boy, that teacher should apologize asap to all the kids who were "slaves" in that class.

[doverz]

That is so fucking horrible. Just watch a movie instead of humiliating a child like that.

[thelilyqueen]

That is just... so wildly inappropriate of the teacher on so many levels. Having a mock slave auction is a highly questionable teaching tactic to begin with (to say the least), but trying to force a student - particularly an African-American one - to participate in such a thing, disciplining them for it when they refuse, and then not apologizing once the screwed-up-ness of the whole situation was pointed out?

(edited for redundancy, and to clarify)

[othellia]

Pretty much this. The video says there were other students chosen to be slaves in the class, so the teacher may or may not have specifically gone after Nikko and/or the other African American student in the class, but as soon as he said he didn't want to do it, she should have respected his wishes. And as for letting the other students touch the ones chosen to be slaves? Jesus Christ, what was she thinking?

[othellia]

True, but I think there's a difference between your average assembly play and an African American student not wanting to be auctioned off as a slave.

[bantiarna]

This story is very interesting to me as my 7th grade History class did the same thing. We drew marbles out of a bag to see who were slaves and who were buyers. I was a slave. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate to us the emotional as well as physical damage of slavery. It certainly made an impression on me. However, we were NOT allowed to be touched. They would say things about us, that I was healthy but skinny, that another child was overweight and slow etc.
We did a lot of things like that in our class, our teacher said it was very important to put ourselves IN history, not to just read it from the books.

My son is in the 7th grade now, he sits in a seat all day long while the teachers read from the text books. All they do is memorize dates.

Clarifiying

[bantiarna]

I am not saying that this is the right thing to do. Only offering some commentary other than "OMG!" and "That sucks" I have no idea if a child in my class would have been able to opt out, noone asked to.

[bantiarna]

The article does not say the black kids were targeted, it doesn't say other than that the children were divided up, there were two black children in the class, one was put on each side. But once the boy became uncomfortable he should have been allowed to quit. Thats true with ANY school activity.

[bowtomecha]

This is never appropriate because it doesn't take into consideration the real sensitivities of the students, much less the potential for abuse by the teacher. There are people that will use what seems like an exercise to ideally shape opinions of racism among students to actually flex their own racism.

my brother is half black and being one of only two people of african american background in his school was forced to sing an old slave song at a cultural exhibition. my mother was shocked that the school made him do something he didnt want to, much less avoid the fact that that was half of his culture and had no say in also representing the german and irish side.