The Daily Beast
Anger comes after the Mississippi school asks children to pretend they are slaves
via Twitter A “slave letter writing activity” at a predominantly white high school in Purvis, Mississippi, generated a furor on Wednesday, with activists alternately calling the exercise demeaning and demoralizing. pretend you’re a slave working on a plantation in Mississippi “and” write a letter to your family in Africa … describing your life “. Purvis Middle School initially referred the Daily Beast to the Lamar County school district for comment, and the district did not respond immediately to the request on Wednesday. But Frank Bunnell, the director of Purvis Middle School, sent an email to his parents, obtained by The Daily Beast, in which he confirmed that the exercise was part of an eighth-grade history class and apologized for “something like this happening under my supervision. The school confirmed to The Daily Beast that Bunnell wrote the email. The director also argued that the slide, which was part of a PowerPoint presentation, was taken out of context. The frustrated locals of Jackson are approaching two weeks without water “One could just read the assignment and draw a very unrealistic view of the real tragedies that have occurred. That was not the intention, ”he wrote. “However, the intention does not excuse anything. There is no excuse for underestimating a practice that (even after being abolished) encourages unfair laws, unfair economic practices, inhumane treatment and repression of a people. ”The exercise cheerfully suggests topics that students can cover in their letters. “You can discuss the trip to America, as well as the day-to-day tasks you perform.” During this “trip”, known as the Middle Passage, more than two million of the approximately 12 million Africans kidnapped and sent to the Americas died. Activists in a state with a long, ugly and lethal history of racism were furious. “I don’t know how a logical person teaches this,” said Jeremy Marquell Bridges, social media manager at Black Lives Matter Mississippi, who posted the picture of the exercise on Wednesday after he said it was sent by a student’s parents. “As if someone who went to school to teach children would think that this exercise was useful in some way. It is not useful, it is painful. ”He was far from alone. This is at Purvis College. Someone needs to explain. ”Said Jarrius Adams, the president of Young Democrats Mississippi. “No matter what the intention was, impact is the only thing that matters.” “If I were the father of a student in the classroom, I would be pissed. There are appropriate ways to educate students about the history of this nation – this was not one of them, “added Adams. A point in the exercise tells students:” You may also want to tell about the family you live / work with and how you spend your time when you’re not working. “As Reginald Virgil, the president of Black Lives Matter Mississippi, told The Daily Beast,” work “is a bizarrely educated euphemism for slave labor.” It’s just another way that Mississippi is trying to cover up its history, ”he said. Although just over 50 percent of students in Mississippi public schools are black, Purvis Middle School is an exception. Just over 12 percent of students at this school are black and over 80 percent are white. “This is Klan territory,” Bridges told The Daily Beast. For Bridges, who studied at Mississippi public schools, the irreverent exercise in slave cosplay was shocking. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. But this exercise has precedent, most notably in Omnibus III: Reformation to the Present, a popular Christian history book co-edited by Douglas Wilson. The Idaho-based evangelical pastor hosted a conference in 2004 defending southern slavery, and has since been called “Taliban on the Polouse” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In Omnibus III, which includes writing papers such as “Uncle Tom’s Abortion Clinic”, it is another entitled “A Slave Letter”. This designation asks students to “pretend that you are a slave who lives far from your family. Write a letter to your wife / husband / children. Tell them how you are doing, what your plans are, etc. ”Students can also pretend to be slave owners and“ write a letter to a relative or friend in the North who thinks that all slaves are mistreated and beaten. Explain how well your family treats its slaves. ”A later exercise tells students to pretend to be runaway slaves, asking,“ Do you have hunting dogs? Take turns hiding in the forest and let the dogs find you. It was not clear whether the lesson that caused the uproar in Purvis Middle was inspired by that text, and neither the school nor the school district in Lamar County responded immediately to additional requests for comment on Wednesday. In 2017, the district launched an investigation after a Snapchat a user with the name “KKK” sent messages about students to students at another high school in the Lamar County school district. Forrest County, directly to its east, was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the infamous Civil War general and the first great magician of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost a hundred years later, in that same county, the Ku Klux Klan murdered civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer after he offered to pay the poll tax to black voters. Although the population of Mississippi is almost 40% black, the largest proportion in the country, the state is governed by Republicans, who hold all seven state and majority positions in the state Senate and House. The state has long been concerned with how to properly contextualize its troubled past. In November, Republican Governor Tate Reeves included $ 3 million in funding to combat what he called “revisionist history” that is “poisoning a generation”. ‘predecessor, former governor Phil Bryant, of his “1776 Advisory Committee”, an educational panel with the aim of “better enabling an emerging generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776.” President Joe Biden dismissed the commission on an executive order on his first day in office. In other words, residents said, the school’s mistake rubbed salt on open wounds. “They want us to think that slavery was educated,” Virgil told The Daily Beast. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Submit to The Daily Beast here. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.