"He told me that he did not want to be Black anymore," Dayes said. "He didn’t want to go to school because he didn’t know if he could trust the teachers."
More than a year and a half after the incident, Dayes said her son still worries that he's being judged because he's Black when they're out in public and his friendships in the small town have been seriously affected.
Simulations are a useful way to teach some parts of history, like civic education, but using this technique to teach about slavery is ineffective and fails to consider the impact on students, particularly Black students.
These kinds of lessons are just one symptom of the systemic problems with how American schools teach – or in some cases fail to teach – about slavery and Black history as a whole.
Brown said when teachers ask students to imagine themselves as slaves or slaveowners, they may be simply attempting to bring history to life to build empathy or give students a more emotional and visceral experience.
"We can never recreate nor should we want to recreate enslavement," she said. "It minimizes the trauma of the history itself."
There are currently no groups tracking how often incidents like this happen across the country, but Brown said it's clear these kinds of lessons are being taught at multiple different grade levels in many locations across the country.
Send an email
