An online game that stimulates slavery is trivializing some of the most traumatic flashpoints of African-American history, said several parents at one Phoenix elementary school and a Black Lives Matter Phoenix vice chairman.
Shock and anger over Mission US: Flight To Freedom, a game allowing students to “adopt the persona” of 14-year-old enslaved girl Lucy King, has caught officials attention at Emerson Elementary School in Phoenix, The Arizona Republic reported. Lucy has to avoid beatings and a plantation master to escape a Kentucky plantation in one of the game’s formats. Parents, especially those who lived through the civil rights era, are crying foul.
“I found out about it last week, when my son told me what happens in the game,” said De’Lon Brooks, whose seventh-grader attends Emerson, a K-8 school. “…As a parent and as someone who grew up under civil-rights (movement) members, I couldn’t allow my son to be subjected to that without my permission.”
How “something racist and sexist could’ve been used and nobody said anything” was an important issue to JJ Johnson, the BLM-Phoenix chairman who met with district officials Tuesday to urge its removal.
The district agrees with BLM and parents’ serious concerns and are taking the issue to its administration “to be reviewed quickly,” said Phoenix Elementary district spokeswoman Sara Bresnahan. Officials blocked access to Mission US Tuesday, but are still unsure about how many students played Flight to Freedom or how the simulation made its way into the classroom.
The game’s name was missing from the district’s “pacing guide,” an online repository of instructional tools available to teachers, but the City of Immigrants mission involving a 14-year-old Jewish girl immigrating to New York from Russia in 1907 was on the list, Bresnahan said.
Officials know of only one seventh-grade classroom that had used the simulation and is checking whether other teachers in the district’s 13 elementary schools had used the game as well.
Perhaps surprising, Mission US has earned nearly 20 awards and honors since The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding for its development. The Flight to Freedom simulation debuted in 2012, the Daily Mail reported.
However, criticisms have come from several teachers and tech specialists about the game, particularly its “downplaying hundreds of years of suffering.”
“It doesn’t make sense for any educator with a clear understanding of what’s going on in society … to think that anything like this would be appropriate for a bunch of elementary-schoolers,” Brooks said.
SOURCE: The Arizona Republic, Forbes
SEE ALSO:
White Teachers Re-Enact Slavery, Act As Ship Captains, Duct Tape Students’ Wrists
Harvard Lays Bare Its Historical Ties To Slavery
Slavery Simulation Game Sparks Outrage At Phoenix Elementary School was originally published on newsone.com
