Every student in Massachusetts has to take one test to graduate, and this year, students anxious about their educational futures were confronted with a question so racist the state has been forced to pull it from the exam. This year’s Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System included a question based on a passage from Colson Whitehead’s searing Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel The Underground Railroad, with students told to write a journal entry from the perspective of a racist white character. The question won’t be scored on tests that have already been taken, while students taking makeup tests will be told not to answer it.
The character, Ethel, is married to a man who shelters people escaping slavery on the underground railroad, but Ethel herself thinks of Cora, the novel’s main character as a “savage,” while “Slavery as a moral issue never interested Ethel. If God had not meant for Africans to be enslaved, they wouldn’t be in chains.” This is the character who teenagers were expected to channel, without warning, in a high-stress testing environment. As Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said in a statement, “For all of the unconscionable aspects of standardized testing, [the state] has imposed a new layer of trauma—particularly on students of color—forcing students to read a tiny excerpt of the book, produce a quick answer about race relations embodying a racist perspective, and then stifle the complicated emotions that emerge.”
Najimy isn’t kidding about the stifling—students are absolutely prohibited from discussing test contents, and teachers are prohibited from knowing what’s on the test. For something to get out, it has to be horrifying. Like this.
“What kind of idiot would have students imagine the rationalizations of a racist coward who shrinks from moral responsibility?,” author Colson Whitehead said, in an email obtained by the Boston Globe. ”There are plenty of heroes in the book—black and white—who stand up and do the right thing in the face of terrible consequences; certainly they are more worthy of investigation. Inhabiting characters like Ethel caused me great emotional distress.” Whitehead subjected himself to that emotional distress as an adult carefully creating a work of art. Massachusetts subjected high school students to it without warning or real purpose. The state owes more to the students than simply not scoring that question.