So this happened…

Last year a 12-year-old attending Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy in Connecticut was sent on a class trip to the Nature’s Classroom program in Charlton, MA.

Innocent enough. Who doesn’t like field trips?

But when she returned upset, her parents found out that there were no smiles or laughs on this particular trip. In fact, she experienced being called a nigger, had to pretend to pick cotton, and was told that if she ran “they would whip me until I bled on the floor and then either cut my Achilles so I couldn’t run again, or hang me.”

In short, the 12-year-old, who is African American, was forced to play the slave in a reenactment.

Her parents have filed a human rights complaint against the Hartford school system.

According to the Bakers, the re-enactment exercise occurred on the third night and included threatening language and use of a racial epithet; packing together students in a dark room, as if they were on a slave ship; and hiding in the woods from “white masters” — instructors at Nature’s Classroom who were white. The students were acting as slaves who had escaped.

Director of the program, John G. Santos, said that thousands of school children have attended the Underground Railroad exercise and defends the use of the experience.

The slavery re-enactment is an “activity that has validity, it’s an historical event, it’s a simulation,” Santos said Thursday. Although Nature’s Classroom is focused on ecology, “ecology includes humankind and we’re working on behalf, and with the schools, that have four major subjects, history being one of them, the social sciences another.” However, Santos said, “No one at Nature’s Classroom would ever endorse the use of the N-word. … Come on. Can it happen? Of course it can happen. Stupid things happen.”

Sure.

In any case, the Bakers removed their daughter from the school system but they are still pursuing the complaint and holding the school administrators accountable for the “social and emotional abuse” the students had to endure.

What in the entire fuck were the program facilitators thinking?

It kind of reminds us of this. And even though he’s laughing, none of this is actually funny.

SOURCE: COURANT, Gawker | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty

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