ATLANTA — Parents of some second graders are furious after their children performed a play with blackface masks at school.
The school has apologized and is now trying to right their wrong.
Some parents told Channel 2's Lauren Pozen they were so upset, they went straight to social media to express their frustration.
TRENDING STORIES:
- Mother of 5 shot to death in driveway of her home
- Cobb teen beaten at Six Flags quietly settles case for $35 million
- Armed robbers hit 18 businesses across metro Atlanta
Out of that came a meeting on Friday afternoon with parents and staff.
One mother told Pozen that the incident was wrong and hurtful.
“We immediately recognized the masks as blackface,” mother Ari Lima said.
Second graders at the Kindezi School at Old Fourth Ward wore paper masks over their faces during a black history performance of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.”
Video of the performance was posted on Facebook by a mother and it sparked outrage.
A fourth grader said the performance upset her.
“I saw some people laughing at it and they thought it was like a comedy,” fourth grader Knasaiah Perry said.
A parent told Pozen that she and others take issue with the appropriateness of the mask and its historical context of the poem.
“It had nothing to do with blackface; Laurence Dunbar is probably rolling over somewhere because it is not contextually accurate,” Lima said.
In response to the backlash, the school apologized and held a meeting Friday evening to talk about how to move forward.
Lima said it's a start, but it still needs work.
“There is this narrative of reshaping black face and amalgamating it so that it’s not an ugly part of our history and there’s really no ownership that the poem didn’t correlate with what we were seeing,” Lima said.
Others say the incident opened a dialogue that is overdue.
“We need to talk about racism in America and that hidden history that comes out too often in the wrong ways,” resident Shaka Mkassa Shakur told Pozen.
In addition to Friday’s meeting with parents, the school said it will also educate its teachers and staff on race and racism in America and how to engage in conversations with students and the community on that topic.
Cox Media Group
