Slavery isn't merely about an ancient Southern subculture. It was founded on Wall Street.
It's a challenging time to teach at South Mountain Elementary. The South Orange school has had incidents of racist graffiti and anti-Semitism in the past year, and against that backdrop, they recently assigned a fifth-grade history project related to America's Colonial period (1600-1740), including its prosperous slave trade.
One assignment was to recreate an advertisement depicting a slave auction, which a few kids spun off as an ad portraying a slave master's reward offer for a runaway slave.
It's an interesting and worthy project, but when parents saw these posters during teacher conferences - parents of all races and ethnic backgrounds, the school affirms - the response was chiefly negative, which we find curious.
There is no law that specifies how our kids are exposed to diversity education, but as Barbara Tuchman said, history is best taught one way: You tell stories. Those who excel at the job - teachers who don't need textbooks to cultivate the faculties of young minds - understand that stories require empathy, an ability to imagine the lives of those imperfect men and women who gave us much of what we have today.
The parents didn't see it that way, though their chief complaint is that a school hallway is too public for such an exhibition. This Facebook post was typical: "It breaks my heart that these will be the images that young black and brown kids see of people with their skin color," a parent wrote, adding that "the medium . . . .is grossly insensitive."
So the school took down the posters and will revisit it at a town hall, but we hope they all heed the advice of Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the eminent Harvard historian who gave the project the thumbs-up as he helped his own fifth-grade daughter with her poster, which was very compelling.
What Muhammad says about history makes sense to us: The only way to address existing legacies of past atrocities is through an honest lens, and it starts with images.
"Black people didn't make the newspaper. This wasn't the age of photography," he said. "The only depictions of black people in Colonial America were as images in slave auction ads or runaway ads - and they were ubiquitous."
Moreover, Muhammad believes that the educational standard has always been to minimize the horrors of slavery - his daughter's textbook has but two sketches - "and if this kind of assignment doesn't exist, it's standard practice to overlook those horrors," he said.
"The notion that we are doing harm to children," he added, "is a selective critique. These are middle school kids who have borne witness to the trauma of black lives for a sustained number of years in media. If we're going to be honest, kids receive explicit and implicit cues about demonization of black and brown people on a daily basis.
"This should be an invitation to the curriculum to impart an understanding of the world we live in, not to hide from it."
Having said that, the school could have posted an explanatory essay to accompany the project, and perhaps this will mollify some at the town hall.
But an accurate depiction of this period is crucial, because an understanding of the American story must begin with the slavery empire that helped authored it.
This is not about some Southern subculture. The slave trade was founded on Wall Street in 1711. There was a slave market there until 1762. New Jersey abolished slavery in 1804, but because of a system of gradual emancipation, its last 13 slaves weren't freed until the Thirteenth Amendment passed in 1865.
As Muhammad noted, "Colonial America wouldn't make sense without an understanding of the economic, cultural and social realities of slaves of that period."
Like it or not, it's our history. It would be an insult to the American legacy - warts and all - to omit it from our curriculum.
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