Black Lives Matter Mississippi/Twitter
March 5, 2021, 6:25 am
At one point, an educator at Purvis Middle School thought it would be a good idea to ask eighth-graders to imagine what it was like to be a slave.
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That led to a Mississippi history class being asked to “pretend like you are a slave working” on a Mississippi plantation” and “write a letter to your family back in Africa or in another American state describing your life.”
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And then, that led to a big ol’ bag of “hell no” and leaders of the school district having to apologize for the assignment, but not before all kinds of outrage was unleashed.
As WDAM-TV reported, Lamar County School District Superintendent Dr. Steven Hampton confirmed the assignment was given to students Wednesday, and a screenshot that circulated around the internet was the last slide in a PowerPoint that students saw.
As Black Lives Matter Mississippi said succinctly, “Someone needs to explain.”
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Hampton attempted to do that, saying that the PowerPoint presentation was about the “atrocities and negatives of slavery,” and the purpose of the assignment “was to show our students just how horrible slavery was and to gain empathy for what it was like to be a slave.”
“We do not discriminate against race. We want to be sensitive to what happened in the past,” Hampton added.
Jarrius Adams, president of Mississippi Young Democrats, was quoted in the Kansas City Star, labeling the assignment as “extremely tone-deaf and inappropriate.”
“It does not matter what the intention was, the impact is the only thing that matters. If I were a parent of a student in the classroom, I would be pissed,” he noted. “There are proper ways to educate students about the history of this nation—this was not one of them.”
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As Insider pointed out, via the Daily Beast‘s reporting, Purvis Middle School has a whiter student body than the average Mississippi school, with more than 80% white students and just 12% Black students. More than half of all Mississippi students, by contrast, are Black—which led, Jeremy Marquell Bridges, social media manager for Black Lives Matter Mississippi, to assess the school as “Klan territory.”
While the general reaction on social media ranged from confusion to outrage, a number also hoped that students turned in blank pages in response to the assignment, to highlight one of the many horrifying aspects of slavery in the U.S.—that children weren’t taught to read and write.
*First Published: March 5, 2021, 6:25 am
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