The slave auction at Norfolk school

A mock slave auction in a Norfolk fourth-grade class, with 9- and 10-year-old children of color for sale, showed the kind of appalling judgment that leaves parents and others speechless.

But it shows something else, as well: 150 years after the first shots were fired in America's Civil War, race retains a potency unrivaled in our culture. And that makes many people - of all races and all ages - very uncomfortable.

The lesson occurred at Sewells Point Elementary on April 1. As part of a history class, a teacher separated children according to race and auctioned the nonwhite children. Five days later, Principal Mary Wrushen sent a letter to parents about the episode.

"Although her actions were well intended to meet the instructional objectives, the activity presented was inappropriate for the students," Wrushen wrote, according to The Pilot's Steven Vegh. "The lesson could have been thought through more carefully, as to not offend her students or put them in an uncomfortable situation."

The legacy of slavery is with us always in America. It is the durable bequest of the Founders, who, for all their idealism, managed to institutionalize one of history's great inhumanities.

The historical freight of that injustice doesn't disappear because people want it to, or because time passes. Slavery is as integral to American identity as the Revolution, as Manifest Destiny, as the world wars.

It goes without saying that a fourth-grade classroom in Norfolk is not the place for a racially accurate reenactment, not the place to divide children and to pretend to sell the darker-skinned people.

But fourth grade is a very good place to talk about the legacy of America's compromises and decisions. It is a very good place to teach children of every color what their ancestors were capable of.

It is not what was taught at Sewells Point that was the problem. It was the way it was taught.

By its nature, slavery is offensive to any thinking human being. No matter how it is taught, it will remain uncomfortable to remember that such bondage was once part of America, was once a major force in its economy.

Children should know that American society was once complicit in such brutality; they should know the terrible costs of throwing off that institution. And that they are costs we still bear today.