https://news.yahoo.com/deeply-offensive-northern-california-school-125718822.html
USA TODAY
'Deeply offensive': California school forfeits football season following
'slave auction' prank
Scott Gleeson
Mon, October 3, 2022 at 8:03 AM
A northern California high school canceled the rest of its football
season after the team enacted a racist and offensive prank.
The football team at River Valley High School in Yuba City, Calif.,
shared a video where team members appeared to act out a "slave auction"
with Black teammates.
Yuba City Unified School District Superintendent Doreen Osumni provided
a statement to CNN and CBS News calling the prank "deeply offensive."
USA TODAY reached out to the school district for comment Monday morning
but did not immediately hear back.
"Re-enacting a slave sale as a prank tells us that we have a great deal
of work to do with our students so they can distinguish between intent
and impact," Osumni wrote. "They may have thought this skit was funny
but it is not; it is unacceptable and requires us to look honestly and
deeply at issues of systemic racism."
Mock slave auctions, racist lessons: How US history class often
traumatizes, dehumanizes Black students
The team members involved in the video were kicked off the team for the
remainder of the season for violating the school's student-athlete code
of conduct, and that left the football team without enough players to
compete for the rest of the 2022 campaign. River Valley forfeited the
rest of the games on its schedule.
In a school email, obtained by the Sacramento Bee, Osumni previously
wrote to parents and District members: "I received a copy of a recording
of River Valley High School football team members acting out a
reprehensible act of a slave auction. The recording clearly demonstrates
that this situation was orchestrated and organized, which underscores my
concern that students spent time contemplating this terrible act without
the slightest regard that this action is hateful and hurtful."
Additional punishment could come for the students involved in the video.
This isn't the first racist and tone-deaf incident regarding a "slave
auction." In March of 2021, an official at a Mississippi middle school
apologized after eighth graders were asked to pretend they were enslaved
people, including writing letters discussing their "journey to America"
and the family they "live with/work for." In 2019, a fifth grade teacher
was accused of holding a mock slave auction in which white students bid
on Black students in New York.
"We can never re-create, nor should we want to re-create, enslavement,"
she said. "It minimizes the trauma of the history itself. These are not
isolated incidents," said Keffrelyn Brown, a professor of cultural
studies in education at the University of Texas-Austin, in a 2021 interview.
"Unfortunately, (slavery is) addressed often in ways that are either
marginalizing or it's the only way that Black people ... are brought
into the curriculum. ...The fact that we only discuss (slavery) is kind
of dehumanizing for the African American culture. Especially in the
perspective of history textbooks, we’re only seen as tools and people
that were utilized."