A Charlotte, North Carolina, public high school teacher’s reading quiz included a discussion question with an answer that suggested Americans are more hesitant to acknowledge the horrors of slavery than those of the Holocaust.
An Ardrey Kell High School English teacher who was quizzing her 11th-grade class on the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler asked students to describe main character Dana’s thoughts after reading about German brutality and genocide during World War II.
The answer suggested that Americans are more hesitant to reckon with the horrors of slavery in 19th-century America than with the Holocaust.
The multiple-choice question, a copy of which the mother of one of the students provided to the Washington Examiner, apparently quoted from the novel, asking what the character had realized after reading “stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation … as though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.”
LAWYER TAKES ON CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN CALIFORNIA
“While the monstrosities of the Holocaust may have been more intense over a shorter period of time, those who lived through slavery endured conditions just as horrible over a much longer duration,” the answer read. “Yet while Americans are largely comfortable acknowledging the events of the Holocaust as the worst impulses of mankind, there is often more hesitancy to take responsibility for the degradation of enslaved people that took place on American soil.”
Brooke Weiss, who is Jewish, snapped a picture of the question Feb. 12 as her daughter was working on the assignment.
“Slavery and genocide are different things, but they’re both atrocities,” Weiss told the Washington Free Beacon. “There’s no value in putting those words in the same sentence, other than pitting those two groups against each other.”
Weiss took the matter up with the school and said the teacher was apologetic.
“The question was removed from the test after I complained, but only after the test had been administered to all of the students,” Weiss said. “I wanted the students to be debriefed, but the school did not agree to that.”
“I fought for weeks to get access to the rest of the materials that my daughter was exposed to,” she added. “Eventually, they allowed me to visit the school and see the materials for myself, but I could not get any pictures.”
Weiss expressed concern that the lesson reflects a trend in the school district, whose board has approved the implementation of curriculum teaching critical race theory in classrooms.
Weiss’s opposition to critical race theory concepts and policy initiatives has led to backlash against her family, she added.
“Last summer, my children were labeled racist because our family doesn’t support BLM,” she said. “My husband is a retired police officer with 31 years on the job. We are against defunding police. It’s been hard on my kids.”
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The Washington Examiner reached out to Ardrey Kell Principal Jamie Brooks about the assignment but did not immediately receive a response.
