Rochester Teacher Accused Of Making Students Pick Cotton

ATTENTION ALL EDUCATORS—and specifically white educators, and even more specifically white educators who have Black students in their classrooms; ALL OF YOUR SLAVERY-RELATED ACTIVITIES ARE RACIST AND STUPID!!

All of them.

Source: Lance Nelson / Getty

No one needs to learn about the transatlantic slave trade through your Make Amistad Great Again in-class activities. Your K-12 Years a Slave lessons are dumb and unnecessary. Your Django Whitesplained exercises are hurting Black children, not teaching them anything. WHY TF DO Y’ALL KEEP MAKING US EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU??

A seventh-grade teacher in Rochester, New York, has been placed on leave while he’s being investigated for allegedly making his Black students pick cotton, call him “massa” and wear handcuffs to symbolize their enslaved ancestors in shackles.

Yes, you read that right.

According to The New York Times, it all started last week when parents of students at the Rochester School of the Arts took to Facebook to share their outrage at white social studies teacher Patrick Rausch, who they said gave cotton balls to his students and instructed them to pick the seeds out.

From the Times:

The parents also said Mr. Rausch referred to himself as “massah” and allowed white students to stop cleaning the cotton when they asked, but not Black students.

“This has been going on all year long,” Vialma Ramos-O’Neal, the mother of a student in Mr. Rausch’s class, said in a Facebook post, describing other racist treatment she said her son had experienced in Mr. Rausch’s class. “I’m so angry and hurt for these kids.”

The parents also said Rausch placed Black students in handcuffs and told them to try to break free.

Now, this man already f**ked up by putting Black children in handcuffs in 2022, but, according to parents and students, when they were unable to break out of the cuffs, he told them, “‘It’s OK, your ancestors couldn’t do it either.’”

WHAT IN THE SQUARE ROOTS IS GOING ON IN THIS PORCELAIN PROFESSOR’S CLASSROOM?? And how the hell has this been allowed to go on “all year long?”

Well, Brendan O’Riordan, a spokesman for the Rochester Board of Education, said in a statement that, immediately after learning about his alleged cotton-picking caucasity lessons, Rausch was placed on leave and replaced by a substitute, and an investigation was launched.

“The District takes these situations very seriously, as descriptions of what occurred in the classroom by the school community are extremely troubling,” O’Riordan said.

The Times noted that “according to state school enrollment data, about half the students at the School of the Arts are Black, and about 65 percent are considered economically disadvantaged.” And now, because this “educator” allegedly thought this was the environment to go full Birth of a Nation in, parents are reporting that their children have been traumatized by what they experienced.

“My daughter is traumatized,” said Tross Morris, another parent who posted about the activities on Facebook and said her daughter purposely missed her school bus to avoid having to endure Rausch’s mock plantation class exercises. “She speaks in a low tone of voice like she’s very saddened, she barely smiles. He made a mockery of slavery.”

All a teacher needs to do to teach slavery is—oh, I don’t know—teach slavery. We don’t need them to have students reenact the horrors of it. All they have to do is give lectures that don’t water down what happened. They don’t need a white supremacy show and tell. (They get plenty of that outside the classroom.)

It’s like white teachers are either teaching a sanitized version of American history to make it palatable for white and fragile consumption, or they’re satisfying their negroes-in-chains fantasies by forcing the Black children in their care to act them out.

And it always blows up in their faces once the public gets wind of it, so why don’t they stop this sh** already?