Is this racist?

When I was in elementary school, all the 5th graders went to a place called Nature's Classroom. "Nature's Classroom is a unique educational experience for students and their teachers, offering the very best in environmental education." Translation: you leave school and go to sleepover camp for 5 days, dissect things and play games in the woods. It was pretty rad if you ask me.

Now I haven't thought about Nature's Classroom in the longest time. Until this weekend that is. I was at my friend Kate's cabin in Moosup, CT when my memory was sparked. It was dark, and a group of us were blindly making our way through the the woods back towards the cabin, desperately trying not to sprain an ankle or run into a barbed wire fence of some sort. I made an off-color comment to my friend Mike along the lines of, "wow, this must have been what it was like to be a slave in the underground railroad" and all of a sudden my memory was sparked: the Nature's Classroom people made us play a game called RUNAWAY SLAVE.

I shit you not. Did anybody experience this? Any Hebron Ave Elementary School alumni out there?

I had completely forgotten about this peculiar activity until that moment, but oh, how the memories came flooding back. The counselors at this "educational retreat" split all of us up into small groups, "families" if you will, told us that we had just escaped and were running to freedom and sent us off into the woods to hide. These counselors, probably in their early twenties, were the "bounty hunters" and came after us. It was kind of like Hide and Seek, except when a Bounty Hunter found you, you could stand still and be "invisible" to them--the theory behind this was since we were pretending that our skin matched the blackness of the night, we were able blend in seamlessly...As long as we didn't move and kept our eyes closed. The other details are semi-fuzzy. I remember some sort of jail, and there must have been a home base of sorts--a Harriet Tubman house or Mason Dixon line--not really sure. I also vaguely remember the bounty hunters carrying big sticks.

I can't tell if a bunch of very white, very middle class 5th graders running through the woods pretending to be slaves is ridiculous or ridiculously awesome. I mean, they didn't put us in black face or anything, and to my recollection no one dropped the N-bomb. There was some definite role playing though. When a bounty hunter captured you, they were not friendly. Oh no. They played their role the best they legally could: making you crawl on the frozen ground, or stand silently in the jail until you were rescued. It was loads of fun. I'm fairly certain we convinced them to let us play it again at the end of the week.

I took a little trip back to Nature's Classroom via the internet and whilst tooling around I was surprised at a) how out of date the pictures are and b) how they now call this wonderful game The Underground Railroad. Is this their attempt at being more PC? Now, its possible this was the name of the game all along. Maybe I'm merely projecting the more inappropriate title upon my memory in order to create a more interesting blog entry, but I really don't think so. I'm pretty sure they called it Runaway Slave.

Bravo to Nature's Classroom for bringing suburban white kids one step closer to understanding the struggle and history of the African American slave.