A Slave Auction in 2017 America

I don’t think anyone would ever mistake me for a leftist – not even being left leaning. There’s not much about them that makes any sense and the decisions they make, the opinions they have, tend to be highly contradictory at times.

 

Their views on children, for example. They teach children about separation of Church and State, but dress them up in Hijabs, conduct mock prayers to Allah and teach them the Five Pillars of Islam.

 

They teach children about the dangers of predatory men in the schoolyard, the playground, on the streets and online. Yet they insist that everyone should be able to use the same bathroom.

 

The left insists on coddling children – protecting them from every potentially dangerous or controversial situation (when it suits their political agenda). They claim that we must shield them from disappointment and anything which can damage a young student’s self-esteem or hurt their little feelings.

 

Knowing this, I was frankly stunned to learn that in liberal New Jersey, students were instructed to conduct mock slave auctions, where white students bid on and purchased their black classmates. Holy Crap! Some leftist academic actually made the conscious decision that this would be a good idea.

 

The Daily Mail reports  that students at Jefferson Elementary School in Maplewood N.J. “had an ‘impromptu’ slave auction where a female fifth grader was put on a block and sold off to her white classmates, earlier in March.”

 

The school insists that it was/is not part of the curriculum and was supervised by a substitute teacher. “The ‘demoralizing’ project was done to teach about the Triangular Slave Trade as the Maplewood, New Jersey, students were learning about the colonization period.”

 

However, this “auction” took place not more than two weeks after another elementary school, South Mountain Elementary School, in the South Orange-Maplewood School District, crafted posters they hung in the hallways depicting slave auctions and runaway slaves.

 

Parents were understandably outraged, as they had no prior notification of the crafting of posters or a mock auction. The students actually wrote descriptions for the types of slaves they were selling and listed cash rewards for capturing missing slaves. Again – Holy Crap!

 

One of the Jefferson Elementary parents, Tracey Jarmon-Woods said that, “I was heartbroken, I had a knot in my stomach. When we’re dealing with the Holocaust we would never put Jewish kids in two lines and say you go to the left, you go to the right as an assignment. If you’re demoralized — sold on a block in 2017 — it may affect you the rest of your life.”

 

Now I seriously doubt that, unless you grow up to be just another snowflake that withers at the sight or sound of anything offensive. But I do agree that this is absolutely inappropriate.

 

I suppose one could make a case for this type of exercise in a college setting, or maybe even high school. But these were fifth graders, which makes them between 10 and 12 years old. There is no way that children this young could ever comprehend such an undertaking. They have not the maturity. Heck – these days it’s doubtful that high school or college kids have this level of maturity, to treat such a thing as an objective exercise, assuming that was the intention – which I doubt – in New Jersey.

 

The school district issued a statement, which read: “The activity was not part of the curriculum, not part of the teacher’s assignment, not condoned by the classroom teacher, and not authorized by the district.”

 

The oddest thing about these incidences is where they took place – in a decidedly blue State like New Jersey. This is the type of occurrence the left would claim could happen only in a State filled with red-neck racists like Texas or one of the old slave States of the South. Certainly not in the enlightened Northeast Corridor.

 

There is no notification as to the identity of the substitute teacher or any punishment that may be dolled out, however it is interesting to note that school Superintendent John Ramos “said in a note to parents that the project at South Mountain Elementary School is part of a larger Colonial America unit that’s been used for ten years.” 

Can you hear the thundering herd of civil rights lawyers making their way to Maplewood, N.J.? I know I can.

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