I received a call today from CNN for an appearance on Headline News with the amazing Richelle Carey. The story happened a couple of weeks ago, but it took me aback and I thought I would quickly share it with the AOL BV family. During a field trip to a former plantation in Charlotte, NC, the tour guide wanted to show the kids what slavery was like. So, he asked the black children to pick cotton while their white classmates stood around and watched. When the CNN producer (a nice woman named Ebony) told me about the story, I had to do a Gary Coleman imitation: "What choo talking bout Ebony?"

Beyond the obvious, this case is disturbing on a multitude of levels. But CNN has asked me to help make this case into a teachable moment. I love finding life lessons in everything, so here are some quick thoughts:

1) The tour guide who did this clearly wasn't thinking: If you want the children to empathize with slavery, why not have them ALL pretend to be slaves? If you have the black children pretending to be slaves and the white kids pretending to be their masters, you are only teaching the white kids to be slave masters and the black kids to be their property.

2) Look at this through the mind of a child: I remember a child in elementary school saying to me, "I wish slavery was still around, because I could then tell you what to do." Those were the same words that Walter Currie's classmate said to him before spraying him with gasoline and setting him on fire. Those were also the words that one child said to another on the bus ride home from the plantation that day in North Carolina. Do you see a trend here? While we as adults might see the educational value in our remarks, children might see it in an entirely different way.

3) When America talks about race, we always get it wrong: America's inability to properly contextualize it's racist past gets us all into trouble; Whites are afraid to talk about race because they don't want to be called racist, and black people are afraid of being labeled "the angry negro" (that's what I am considered to be here at Syracuse University). However, I've always believed that intelligent and mutually respectable dialogue can go a long way toward helping all of us to learn how to appreciate alternative viewpoints. I don't care if a white person says something racist to me: I only care if he isn't interested in trying to understand why his words were offensive.

4) Yes, this kind of thing does traumatize children: One of the organizers of the slavery/plantation tour in North Carolina stated that the children never complain about the slavery program. But the problem is that just because the child doesn't complain, that doesn't mean that they are not traumatized. It is important to understand that a child doesn't necessarily know how to express his/her feelings and doesn't always feel empowered to respond to abusive actions by adults. So, it is up to us to be intelligent enough to know when a certain style of thinking or behavior might be harmful to a child.

You can watch the CNN video of the below:




Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World Coalition. To have Dr. Boyce commentary sent to your email, please click here.