Northam’s office told the Post that while giving a tour of the mansion, the first lady simply handed the cotton to whomever was nearby, not intending to single out the African Americans in the group.
She did give it to African American children, then her office saying it was only because those children were nearby. Doesn’t sound like she shared cotton with anyone else “nearby”. That’s where the insensitivity comes into play I would say.
Yes, it would be very wrong to conduct any action that recreated in the minds of a student the suffering or depravation those living before them had to endure. Limit their education to the written word, solely, and sanitize that to the nth degree while you’re at it.
I teach history, and the expansion of green seed cotton and the effect it had on our history is indelible. Until you handle the plant, you really don’t get an appreciation of the important of the cotton gin. Without the cotton gin, slavery would not grown exponentially in our country. Context matters. This may have been a valuable historical exercise.
This latest outrage hit the news a couple of days ago. I was hoping TPM wouldn’t carry it because the way it is written is purposely misleading. Like if we don’t actually have real things to be outraged about with Trump in office.
Yes, it’s important to talk about slavery and how it changed America. There are ways to do that, but it doesn’t help the Northams, when the governor and his wife are tone deaf.
It seems she singled out AAs to hand out cotton to and probably not any white children in the group, since the article seems to allude to the fact that there were also other kids present but they weren’t “nearby”. I’m pretty sure, black folks don’t need an education about how hard it was to pick cotton as slaves. Its the white children that actually need to learn those lessons foremost to build what we commonly call “empathy” these days. Just my take.
Going way out on a limb here, if Ms. Northam had implied that slavery was bad merely because cotton is a terrible plant to handle, that would be bad. That is something I would be careful about, were I attempting to educate children on the topic! Cotton being terrible is a contextual detail about the horrors of slavery, but of course it is not the whole story. That’s an important point to emphasize.
But as far as I know, we have absolutely no reason to think Ms. Northam implied that cotton was the only bad thing about slavery.
While you may find it hard to believe these things are often baked into the curriculum provided. Same with pinning a star on random students for the WWII curriculum. And teachers are given remarkably little choice about it.
Why are you pretty sure of that? It’s not as if there’s some sort of genetic memory of the labor involved, or the finger-pricks from the thorns, or whatever. Actually handling the physical object seems like it would be informative for anyone who has never handled it before, full stop.
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Edit to add: if Ms. Northam only handed cotton balls to white children, then turned to the black kids and said “You already know how terrible this stuff is”, would that be better??
The article says that the black children were not singled out and again, I don’t see anything tone death about this. This smacks of manufactured outrage to me.
I shot a short video on my iPhone of my cat taking a dump, followed by him covering it and stooping to lick his ass. I was trying to understand what it must be like to be Adam Sandler.
“Mrs. Northam then asked these three pages (the only African American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” Walker wrote. “I can not for the life of me understand why the first lady would single out the African American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”
This. If indeed the children were not singled out based on race, this is a familiar pedagogical tool for showing the difficulty of the labor required of enslaved people. In any normal circumstance, I think a teacher would deserve the benefit of the doubt before adults react this way to such a lesson.
But Ralph Northam’s plainly disingenuous dodges of his own culpability make extending such generous assumptions difficult. It’s understandable that the parents involved would view acts by those close to him with heightened suspicion, even if their objections would otherwise seem unjustified.
I am guessing that white people are not supposed to talk about the hardships of slavery anymore. That is now the exclusive province of black people. smh.
From what we know it looks like this was a well-intentioned effort to have a brief tactile component to help kids see how arduous the labor was. Pam Northam was a teacher, among other things, and it would fit from what I know about lesson plans and so forth. Beyond that it sounds like about 55 percent ginning cranking up a controversy and 45 percent fer chrissakes Pam Northam do ya think maybe the Northam family should be careful about cotton and slavery and so forth?
“summer is ready…”