DOVER, N.H. — A high school teacher in New Hampshire has been put on leave after a racially insensitive video surfaced of two students singing, “KKK, KKK, Let’s kill all the blacks,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” CBS Boston reports.
“I feel like, am I the only person that thinks this is wrong?” Chloe Harris asked herself when she recorded video of the jingle in her 11th-grade history class.
“It was basically just talking about killing black people and blood under our feet,” Harris said.
Harris said she found the song so abhorrent that she walked out of class. “This is disgusting to me,” she said.
CBS Boston reports that it was an assignment given by her history teacher, identified by Dover Superintendent William Harbron in Foster’s Daily Democrat as John Carver.
“I was already uncomfortable with the premise of the project because it was to take a Christmas jingle and transform it into an explanation about a racially charged event,” Harris said.
Harbron said the teacher is on paid administrative leave as the district interviews students. The leave allows the administration “to really dig deep into the investigation,” he said, according to Foster’s Daily Democrat.
Beyond investigating the intent of assignment, Harbron wants to know why the teacher didn’t interrupt the song. “We have lots of questions that we still need to research and have answered,” Harbron said.
“It was supposed to be part of a unit of study on the reconstruction period following the Civil War,” he said.
Harris said she doesn’t think her classmates meant to make her uncomfortable. “I know the kids,” she said. “They’re not horrible, racist kids. They’re nice kids.”
But it was a position she said she should not have been in in the first place. “That should not be in the curriculum and we should not be forced to do an assignment like that,” Harris said.
The superintendent said more investigation must be done before he can decide if any students should face discipline.
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