Children’s Slave Posters & A Mock Slave Auction in Progressive New Jersey
We can’t defeat racism without looking inward
Parents who attended a school open house in South Orange, New Jersey early in March found slave auction signs drawn by their children and posted on the walls. All. Hell. Broke. Loose.
Still reeling one week later, we learned that children in Maplewood put on a mock slave auction where at least one black child was “sold” and “whipped” by some white peers — while under the supervision of a substitute teacher.
The punches kept coming. We heard about racist and anti-Semitic graffiti in schools, students and a teacher using the N-word in class, children screaming “Heil Hitler” in the halls, and other acts of hate.
None of this made sense to South Orange and Maplewood (SOMA) residents who share a school district and pride ourselves on our diversity. Didn’t South Orange follow Maplewood in declaring itself a sanctuary city only weeks earlier? Suddenly, we made national and international headlines for racism that left many feeling exposed, angry, betrayed, and distrustful.
Period-era WANTED and SLAVE AUCTION signs in textbooks are disturbing enough. Seeing these signs reproduced with the exuberance, creativity, and innocence of a child’s drawing and handwriting unnerved and repulsed me. The disturbing nature of the signs crawled under my skin and lived there for a while. I couldn’t shake the anger. It triggered painful memories from my childhood in SOMA and kept them at the surface.
While I stared at the posters, my husband received an alert for a video posted by our town’s first female and Korean-Scottish-American village president (mayor) celebrating a beautiful multi- racial and ethnic group of girl scouts marching through town to “encourage and empower” girls and young women. They held up brightly colored signs supporting girl power, laughed, and held hands. I struggled to process the contradictions between the smiling girl scouts and the slave posters.
Since November, progressives have waged war against racist propaganda and policies promulgated by Trump. We reveled in some successes.
However, we cannot limit our focus to challenging federal attacks at the expense of examining our own neighborhoods. (I say it again: “Local is the new federal!”)
We need to confront prejudice and hate in our communities and in our homes. The eventual benefits of acting locally, however, come with a price that we must pay today. Acting locally challenges us to see the ugliness in front of us and, in doing so, compromises the spaces where we rest, replenish, and feel safe.
What do I do when I can’t just blame Trump?
I want to blame all of this on Trump. I want to say that his vitriol has created the bias and hate that we see growing in our communities.
But the truth is, prejudice, racial insensitivity, and hate are far from new. I grew up in Maplewood and now live in South Orange. This is home and I love it. However, I often find myself in a unique and awkward position. I can see how much these towns have changed while simultaneously recognizing that, like all of the United States, we have much more work to do.
We are THE place to go if you don’t want to live in a suburb only with people who look like you.
A lot has changed. When my family moved to the area, these were white towns. (There were too few people of color to use the words “predominantly white.”) People of color now comprise approximately 40% of South Orange.
We do so in ways that may surprise you. Our residents often stray from the monolithic stereotype of people of color — namely low-income, poorly educated, and single head of household families. Many SOMA African-American families have highly educated, dual-income, and high-wage-earning parents.
We have similarly situated Latino, Asian, and Caribbean families — some immigrants, but many US-born. We have proud and openly Muslim and Sikh families. We have equally proud, openly gay and lesbian families, many of whom are racially blended families through marriage and adoption. I usually can’t go a block without seeing an interracial family.
This racial and ethnic diversity did not just happen. When residents saw “white flight” beginning over 20 years ago, they knew what would come with it — reduced state and federal resources, less political influence, dropping property values, and more. So, they changed perceptions by projecting our diversity as our strength. We are THE place to go if you don’t want to live in a suburb only with people who look like you.
This said, not enough has changed. The past few weeks have reinforced this point. Residents of all races have repeatedly declared that they moved to these towns because they thought they were “the ideal,” “Shangri-la,” or “the perfect place” to live for diversity and positive race relations. To be clear, no community in the United States could meet this standard. Our racial history is too divisive, pervasive, and bloody.
Living together does not eradicate our nation’s complex racial past. We have to talk openly about our histories so that we can find our commonalities, learn how to respect and appreciate our differences, and evolve so that internalized bias and privilege don’t harm others and undermine what we’re trying to build. We especially need to do this if we call ourselves liberals or progressives. We must strive to become and reflect the change we demand in the world.
Seeing other African-Americans or interracial couples like mine is not enough for me. If we believe in what we’re saying, it should not be enough for any of us. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great place to start. There’s liberation in not having to enlighten people about, explain, or justify your family composition constantly.
We also don’t have some of the ugliness of multi-racial communities such as Brooklyn where white and interracial families built a more diverse community by displacing black and brown families. But, when building on the roots of white towns, we have deep histories of racism that we need to address before we can spike the ball. We have to know about and understand these pasts in order to progress.
Making America great again?
My first day in school in Maplewood may have differed from how you started school in your hometown. I only remember two things about that day — how excited I was for it to start and how I felt when it ended. I was five and in the first grade.
First, I should tell you that I was a very particular child. I liked my clothes to match and remain clean and tidy. I didn’t run around and scream in the house. I loved reading under my mother’s long skirts when she cooked.
I also knew my mind. After work, my father sometimes brought his close friend, Mr. Spiotta, to pick me up from my Montessori preschool. I told Mr. Spiotta — at four — that I would follow in his daughter’s footsteps and go to Wellesley College one day. I was focused. So there I was early that morning, excited for the first day of school, picking out what I would wear with my mom, and imagining what the day would bring.
It happened like this. After school, I walked through the foyer to go home. I felt like a “big girl” because, after my insistence and practice with them, my parents let me walk home on my own. (It was the 70s and we didn’t have many of the fears that we have today.) I was in my own world, excited to tell my mother — a stay-at-home mom—about my first day.
The next thing I remember is a blond boy coming up to me, pulling on my coat, and tearing it. He spit on me and called me Nigger. He threw me to the ground, kicked me, and ran off. I remember looking up and seeing adults and students staring at me. No one did anything. I scrambled up and ran home. I rang my doorbell and my mother greeted with her usual big smile. Her face changed dramatically when she saw me. I told her what happened through sobs and tears.
The next thing I remember is a blond boy coming up to me, pulling on my coat, and tearing it. He spit on me and called me Nigger. He threw me to the ground, kicked me, and ran off.
My mother does not fit the stereotype of the angry black woman. She greets the world with a smile, dances around a lot, speaks truth, and comfortably sees herself as a combination of Angela Davis and the black Donna Reed. My husband teasingly calls her the “Black Panther debutante” and if you knew her, this would make sense. She is proud of and confident in her blackness AND she wants you to maintain your dignity while yelling at the Man.
I remember my mother holding my infant sister and coats swirling around me. Then my mother took me by the arm and we were out the door. Marching. I could barely keep up with her pace. Mom was angry! She didn’t speak. The next thing I knew, we were at my school. She walked past the secretary who hurried to rise to stop her. She couldn’t. My mother walked into the principal’s office and told him that this would never again happen to her daughter in his school. That was it. We left.
The pace home was slower, but just as quiet. Mom still had to sort through her feelings. I knew then and there that my mother would always have my back and she has. I also remember thinking that we marched because that’s what my parents did with us so often — marched and advocated for the rights of black folks.
Years later, I would mention that day and ask my mother why we marched instead of taking the car — expecting her to tell me that it was a form of protest. Her face turned pensive: “I was so angry; I forgot we had a car.”
Why isn’t sympathy enough?
I’ve been looking at slave posters drawn by hands too young to comprehend their full meaning and import. I have spoken to friends and strangers about these events in our towns for weeks — at lunch, over coffee, on the phone, during meetings, in the park, and in grocery lines. We tried to make sense of it all.
Surprisingly, some of my anti-Trump allies argued that distilling people down to body parts or labor uses helps children understand the horrors of slavery. Here’s what I don’t get. Why must children experience or participate in oppression to comprehend its vulgarity? What happened to sympathy? Where will we draw the line?
Will we have children recreate horrifying Nazi posters showing Jewish people with horns and eating babies to understand the Holocaust?
Will we cram children in a dark, foul room and have them pretend they’re in cattle cars to understand Auschwitz?
Will we have our children draw offensive posters depicting Japanese-Americans with slanted eyes and anti-US conspirators to understand internment camps in the US?
Will we compel our children to force-march through the woods to understand the Trail of Tears?
Why must we marginalize children from oppressed communities to teach all children about oppression?
This justification for the project also focuses on the experiences of white children. Most black and brown children learn at young ages that the world can be cruel to them because of their skin color.
Parents have to teach them that others can scar, maim, and destroy black and brown bodies for any reason or no reason at all. African American children usually learn early about slavery’s existence and, especially, about aspects of its legacy.
How we discuss race in our communities matters.
As much as liberals and progressives celebrate diversity, too many avoid talking about race even when the issue is about race. “Color-blind” or “neutral” language is used instead.
How does blindness help people see the world? How does neutrality advance social justice? Talking about race and understanding its past and ongoing role in our society forces us to confront the iniquity and pervasiveness of institutionalized racism. For these reasons, I have been surprised by how little my local school administration has shared about the incidents.
There was a collective gasp when an African-American mother informed residents at a town meeting that her young daughter was “sold into slavery” at school. (Official communications had omitted the children’s races when describing the incidents.) She acknowledged that the students came up with the idea of making a video. However, she argued that “the curriculum made it safe” for them to do it. While watching her speak, I saw the same look of pain and anger that was on my mother’s face decades earlier.
During another meeting, a parent of a child in the class told us that the video idea arose because students struggled with a common dilemma for today’s youth: “How do we complete our school assignment in a way that will make it go viral?” They decided to “jazz up” a video on slavery to get more hits, which led them down a painful path. Social media is not an excuse for what happened. It only gets us to a small part of the problem and the blame.
Frankly, I blame the adults who were MIA during too much of the process that led to the creation of the video. After all, there was a substitute teacher in the room during the auction. Teachers interacted with these children for years. Parents love and teach their children every day. Children spend time with adult family members, friends of the family, and so many others.
With all of these interactions, these children did not learn enough about how to discuss race, relevant boundaries, and the intense pain that racial insensitivities and racism can cause. Why didn’t they learn this? Because too many adults avoid speaking about race and, in doing so, don’t know how to discuss it.
If we aren’t able to talk openly about racism in progressive communities, how will we sway those who lack our convictions or change the hearts and minds of those opposed to us?
Few of us like it when proverbial mirrors are held up to our faces. However, can anyone think that learning about one’s privilege, sense of entitlement, and assumptions are worse than having to witness and suffer their effects every day? Surely, change is better. Systemic change must make us uncomfortable and cause us pain because it’s challenging every aspect of the world we know and our most private selves.
I often hear that it takes a village to raise a child. Yet, we don’t educate young children about the people, cultures, and histories that comprise that village.
We teach children to understand their bodies so that they can know the difference between a “good” touch and a “bad” touch. This helps to protect them from the monsters that want to harm them. We must also educate them about racism to protect them from racist ideologies and racial insensitivities that can implant in their hearts, twist their thinking, and allow them to hurt others.
Failing to teach children about the numerous levels of oppression that exist in society does not mean that they remain innocent or ignorant of these evils. Nature abhors a vacuum. Children will fill the silence of their parents and schools with society’s din and rancor of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and so many other forms of hatred.
While engaging in these frank discussions, we also must learn how to hear anger without rushing to judgment or knee-jerk defensiveness. If said respectfully and without inciting violence, why is anger condemned? Why is it ignored or not heard? How can we move forward to work through our painful history and present if we don’t listen to or understand the anger that these incidents generate?
Progressives can’t just point fingers outward.
While the posters shocked parents, the highly publicized and intensely negative reaction stunned some of the school administrators, teachers, and students. Some felt attacked for doing their jobs or going to school. After all, the poster project had been a recurring one in the district for ten years. Why such a reaction now? Believe it or not, I think that it has to do with Trump.
Time to brush off our high school biology text. Remember punctuated equilibrium? In essence, punctuated equilibrium argues that species can remain generally stable for millions of years until a rapid (punctuated) change turns them into a new species.
Too many SOMA residents had become comfortable with the idea that our visible diversity meant that we had arrived. Trump’s election forced those comfortable with our status quo to change rapidly and to identify racism more clearly at federal, state, and local levels.
Many of us see race differently than we did a year ago. We have developed less tolerance for racial insensitivity and, especially, racism because the presidential election shows what condoned prejudice begets.
Families with people of color refuse to tolerate or quietly address racism in our schools. White families better comprehend and identify racial oppression experienced by their friends and allies because they can’t afford to believe in a post-racial society. It’s not just retro-PC think distilled into palatable soundbites. The resistance is much more than soundbites, but it still has a long way to go.
Progressives need to confront these realities within themselves and their organizations. Because, doing unto others does not mean that you don’t have to do unto yourself.
This said, many progressives oppose the racism that underpins Trump’s presidency without examining their own prejudices. While protesting the Trump agenda, I have repeatedly observed and experienced racist (and sexist) behavior by those who would be the first to condemn it at a podium. People who identify institutionalized racism on a national scale suddenly fail to recognize when they perpetuate it in their own backyards:
- The same person who will bring up out of nowhere how she thinks Adele robbed Beyoncé of a Grammy will actively undermine and marginalize me in meetings while going out of her way to support white allies who admit that they have not worked nearly as hard.
- Activists will quickly tell me how they can’t comprehend why people voted for Trump because he is “such a racist.” Yet, they will vehemently protest and attempt to curtail a black leader’s position under the guise of transparency or checks and balances. But then, they don’t apply these same concepts of transparency and abridged power to white people in these positions.
I see too much of this in our “progressive” organizations. And no, actively working with other black people to avoid addressing one’s own racism towards another black person does not erase past behavior. I can’t imagine teaching a child that it’s okay to beat up one girl as long as you are really nice to another group of girls who look like her.
Progressives need to confront these realities within themselves and their organizations. Because doing unto others does not mean that you don’t have to do unto yourself. If this self-examination and evolution do not occur, we will not get nearly far enough in our campaigns or, more importantly, in building the communities that we say we want. We will continue to be blindsided by mock slave auctions and the like because we’re not addressing our core problems.
Children are watching and learning to repeat our mistakes.
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Want to read more by me? See, Local is the New Federal.
