A Mock Slave Auction at a North Carolina School is the Latest Incident of Black Students Living the History that Many Schools Don't Want Taught.

While opponents of critical race theory decry that white students shouldn't be made to feel "guilty" about America's past, certain aspects of history are repeating in schools nationwide

Image credit: Tero Vesalainen/Getty Images

Whenever the debate over whether critical race theory should or shouldn’t be considered in schools’ curriculum, one of the main arguments used by [mostly white] opponents of it, is rooted in the concern that white students learning about the history of race relations and racism in America will be overtaken with shame or guilt for being born white. Conservatives [of all backgrounds] lament about the teachings of a complete and accurate American history. In their minds, white children being made to learn about the role racial subjugation and slavery played in the founding and building of this country, is divisive. They do not want white children carrying the burden of their forefathers’ sins, or being made aware of exactly how brutal the US was to enslaved Africans, and Indigenous peoples, or learning of America as anything other than a benevolent land of freedom and opportunity.

It is critical to the preservation of white supremacy culture that white students do not become educated on just how flawed America really is and has been with respect to its treatment of non-white citizens. It is also of equal importance that students of color, primarily Black students, are not educated on just how inequitable and unequal the United States was at its inception, or how the dehumanization of Black people has been a throughline in America’s narrative since day one, persisting to present-day.

But the thing about American racism is that its slip is always showing, therefore it does not matter if white students are learning about it in class or not because it is always being modeled for them in the real world. And those real-world lessons in bigotry often make their way back to school campuses, such as in a recent incident of a mock auction that took place at J.S. Waters School in Goldston, North Carolina.