A team building game for a Black Virginia middle school student ended with him picking up cotton balls with his nose. The eighth grader and his mother are calling out the teacher and the school district for allowing the racially insensitive game to happen in the classroom.
“The teacher was not willing to accept the wrongness. She wasn’t willing to accept the insensitivity of the situation,” Keisha Kirkland said to WJLA.
Sidney Rousey is an eighth grader at Gunston Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. The teenager is the only Black student in his French class and on Feb. 6, a long-term substitute teacher pressed students in the class to participate in a team building activity.
According to the district spokesperson, “Using only their nose, the players were challenged to move the cotton balls one at a time from one end of the table to a bowl at the other end of the table. The object was to see who could move the most cotton balls,” Frank Bellavia explained. The Vaseline would allow more cotton balls to stick to a person’s nose during the game.
“We’re supposed to put Vaseline on our nose and pick cotton, and I remember she asked if there were any volunteers and everybody in the class looked at me in the class,” Rousey said.
“She was looking at me and was forcing me to get up there and play the game and I really didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to get in trouble by the teacher,” he continued.
The game made Rousey feel uneasy and later that day he reluctantly told his mom, Keisha Kirkland about it.
“He stumbled a couple of times trying to tell me, and I said just spit it out, tell me. Then he has this grin on his face, and I said just tell me,” Kirkland said to WRC.
Kirkland said she was stunned after learning what happened.
“My mouth dropped. I said, why are they playing a game like this, and why did you play? He said, I felt like I had to,” Kirkland said.
Rousey…
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