by Sam Gurwitt | Jan 28, 2020 4:09 pm

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Posted to: Arts & Culture, Theater, Hamden, Parental involvement, Schools

A play aimed at introducing elementary school students to the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade has instead sparked concern about how race is taught today in Hamden schools.

The play was originally slated to be performed in a West Woods fifth-grade classroom. That plan has now been scuttled.

The play includes characters like “King Babu” and Colonial slave-traders who justify their participation in the murderous slave trade.

The day after the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s birthday, a fifth-grade class at the West Woods School was going to act out this passage and other scenes as part of a lesson.

Once parent Carmen Parker learned about it, she complained to the school and the district, as well as state elected and education officials. The play has been canceled. The debate, in a school system where most teachers are white and most students aren’t, is just beginning.

Carmen Parker’s daughter, a biracial 10-year-old, was going to play one of two unnamed characters: Enslaved African 2. An African-American boy in the class was going to play Enslaved African 1.

In a later scene, Parker’s daughter and the boy playing the other slave were going to lie down together, as if in a slave ship, after a student playing a slave trader cracked a whip to scare them. The only scene in the play depicting the horrors of a trade that stole and murdered tens of millions of Africans feels like an afterthought in a read-aloud meant to teach why people traded in human lives in a fun and engaging way.

When Parker heard about it, it didn’t sound like fun.

Parker moved to Hamden this summer from Georgia. She began her position as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale this fall, where she researches racism in medicine.

“Within five months of moving to Hamden, I had a severe racial incident with my daughter at our school,” she said.

(Update: Hamden has placed the teacher on leave. Click here for a follow-up story.)

A “Personnel Matter”

Last Tuesday, Parker’s daughter’s teacher told students they would be acting out the play, called “A Triangle of Trade: The Colonial Slave Trade,” in class. The district’s computer system was down because of a computer virus, and the teacher was using the play as an alternative to what had been planned, according to Parker.

The play, published in a compilation of read-aloud plays about colonial America by Scholastic in 2003, “seeks to provide some economic insights about why European rulers and their colonists agreed to such a morally reprehensible venture and why the African rulers might have joined in despite the harm to their people.”

It does so with Alexander Graham Bell working as a telephone operator to facilitate conversations between the various parties of the slave trade. Most scenes explain each party’s justification for his involvement. The play takes a light tone that attempts to make learning about slavery a fun class activity. Injustice is mentioned mostly in passing. Only one slave has a name. He appears at the end in a scene where a slave owner informs him that the “triangle trade” has been abolished in the colonies.

The play ends with the slave owner telling the slave, Jacob, that he is still not free. “Jacob pauses to sigh and slowly exits,” the stage direction reads.

According to Parker, the teacher had told students that they would be discussing a sensitive subject in class, and that if any of them felt uncomfortable, they should say “ouch” as a safe word. Parker said the teacher told her that students had then volunteered for their roles.

Wednesday morning, Parker’s daughter told Parker about the play. Parker’s daughter was thrilled, Parker said. “‘They’re putting on a play in class, isn’t that cool?’” Parker recalled her daughter saying. “She’s a child. She doesn’t even know to be offended.”

Parker said that when her daughter was in school in Georgia, no teacher would have assigned that play to students. No teacher would think it is OK to have students act out a play in which Gestapo members round up Jews, she said.

“We don’t even play cowboys and Indians anymore,” she said. “How are we playing slaves and masters?”

Superintendent Jody Goeler said that the play was not a part of the curriculum, and that it had not been approved by the district.

“I cannot defend this instructional resource,” he told the Independent. “The district won’t defend it and support it.”

He said that teachers sometimes make mistakes. “This was a bad one,” he said, adding that the district is dealing with the incident “as a personnel matter.”

Equity Quest

This is not the first time parents have brought concerns to the Hamden School District about cultural sensitivity in the curriculum.

In April, students and parents spoke at the Board of Education and discussed what they said were deeply-rooted issues with the way the district and its teachers handle race. Last January, community members gathered for a panel discussion about teacher and curricular diversity in Hamden.

The board has made improving racial and socio-economic equity districtwide one of its main long-term goals. It created an equity committee to oversee the district’s equity-related initiatives and to hear the concerns of parents and students. It has ramped up efforts to recruit more teachers from racial minorities in order to make district staff better reflect the student body. It has started a partnership with Southern Connecticut State University to groom high schoolers to pursue teaching careers.

Progress has been slow. For example, when district Director of Human Resources Gary Highsmith emailed 500 people the state said were minority teachers looking for jobs, only 10 percent responded. Almost all of them had either moved out of state, or already held a job.

According to 2019 data from the State Department of Education, the district had a 90-percent white teaching staff in the 2017-2018 school year. The student body, meanwhile, is 60 percent students of color.

The district has implemented a number of professional development programs to help its staff teach a majority-minority student body. Some teachers have also taken matters into their own hands to fundraise for teaching materials that better reflect the district’s diversity, like Kara Breen at the Ridge Hill School.

“No Child Should Have To Experience This”

Parker said she moved to Hamden because of its diversity. Agents, locals, everyone: “They used diversity as a selling point,” she said.

“What I didn’t know was that the diversity didn’t translate into a safe environment in its education system… I could be mistreated this much for half the price somewhere else,” she said, referring to the town’s high taxes.

After hearing about the play Wednesday morning, she called the school. The teacher called her back. Parker said that she didn’t think the play was an appropriate way of teaching children about slavery, and that she was concerned about how black people were portrayed in the play.

The teacher, she said, responded that she was disappointed Parker’s daughter had portrayed the play in such a negative light. The teacher told Parker that she would send home a letter to parents that day informing them that their children might be dealing with a sensitive topic, said Parker.

When her daughter came home at the end of the day, she told Parker that the play had been canceled because a parent complained.

The next day, Parker and her husband met with West Woods Principal Dan Levy. She said he acknowledged that the play was not ideal, and that there are better ways of educating students about slavery.

Shortly after the meeting, she said, she received an email from District Director of Social Studies Jennifer Vienneau and Assistant Superindendent Chris Melillo. On Friday, Parker met with Vienneau and Melillo. They were “the first to firmly acknowledge the grievous nature of the play and to acknowledge that no child should have to experience this.”

It was a genuine apology, she said, that she had not received either from Levy or from the teacher. She said she told Melillo that in addition to the professional development initiatives in the district, the district needs to get help in crafting its curricula from members of the cultural and racial groups that students study.

Levy did not respond to requests for comment in time for the publication of this article.

Going Public

Over the weekend, Parker said, she decided to go public with the story.

“Who am I as a woman, as a minority, as a professional if I don’t use every position I have to advocate for my kids,” she said. She added that she has devoted her career to studying and fighting racism in medicine, and that she hadn’t expected to have to do it at her daughter’s school, but that she feels it’s important to do.

She said she has also sought legal counsel, and has spoken to town officials, state legislators, state education officials in order to get the story out.

Parker will speak to the Board of Education’s Equity Committee Tuesday evening.

It’s time, she said, for Hamden to reckon with the culture that allowed a teacher to think it was ok to assign the play. “That day was guaranteed when they sent my baby home a slave,” she said.