A predominantly white middle school in Mississippi has come under fire for one of its eighth-grade history assignments.
According to The Daily Beast, eighth-graders at Purvis Middle School were told to “pretend like you are a slave working on a Mississippi plantation and “write a letter to your family back in Africa describing your life,” earlier this week.
This is at purvis middle school. Someone needs to explain ? #Blacklivesmattermississippi pic.twitter.com/PZeGOB55ZR
— Black Lives Matter Mississippi (@BLivesMatterMS) March 3, 2021
Activists caught wind of the bigoted assignment and called out the administrators for issuing the work. The publication reported that Purvis Middle School initially tried to funnel questions about the project to the Lamar County School District. Administrators at the county-level didn’t immediately respond.
The principal Frank Bunnell wound up sending an email to parents apologizing for “something like this happening” under his leadership. He also argued that the assignment was taken out of context. The Daily Beast reported that it obtained a copy of the email and published the obligatory “my bad.”
“A person could read just the assignment and draw a very unrealistic view of the true tragedies that occurred. That was not intended,” he wrote. “However, intent does not excuse anything. There is no excuse to downplay a practice that (even after abolished) spurs unjust laws, unfair economic practices, inhumane treatment, and suppression of a people.”
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The obtuse PowerPoint exercise read like a typical employee’s day at work– as if enslaved Africans had leisure time to write such an asinine letter.
“You may discuss the journey to America, as well as the day-to-day tasks you perform.”
Black Lives Matter Mississippi posted the abominable exercise on Twitter after a parent sent it to him.
“I don’t know how a logical person teaches this,” Jeremy Marquell Bridges, social media manager for Black Lives Matter Mississippi, told the Daily Beast. “Like someone who went to school to teach children could think this exercise was helpful in any way. It’s not helpful, it’s hurtful.”
Reginald Virgil, the president of Black Lives Matter Mississippi, told The Daily Beast, “work” is a daft understatement for slavery.
“It’s just another way that Mississippi is trying to whitewash its history,” he said.
Purvis Middle School has a 12% Black student population and is more than 80% white.
Bridges referred to the area where the school is located as “Klan territory.”
The pathology of white supremacists continues to downplay the atrocities associated with slavery. The tone-deaf exercise didn’t consider that enslaved Africans in Mississippi were made up of numerous descendants of African tribes who were stripped of their cultures, languages and customs.
In 1830, Mississippi had a slave population that “increased by nearly 200 percent, exploding from 65,659 to 195,211,” according to Mississippi History Now.
Given Mississippi’s history as the state with the most recorded lynchings, the administrators should have known better– but white people.
