A video posted to the Public Freakout subReddit showed an unidentified substitute teacher arguing with a Black student who challenged the "All Lives Matter" she had written on the board.
The poster, The-Brixon, shared some details about what happened before recording started.
"For context: Actual teacher has a Black Lives Matter sign in their classroom."
"A substitute took down the sign, then wrote 'All Lives Matter' on the whiteboard. At the end the student erased it and the substitute got even more upset."
The video begins with the Black student mid-sentence, commenting on what the substitute wrote on the board.
The student said:
"Oh, 'White lives matter'; nothing has happened to them, nothing bad has happened to them."
The teacher was clearly becoming angered by the student's pushback.
The teacher responded, raising their voice:
"Nothing bad has happened to a White person? Ever?"
The student stopped the substitute and said:
"We're not talking about that. I'm just saying straight up—were you a slave?"
The teacher came back at the student with a completely inaccurate statement posed as a question:
"Who sold who into slavery?"
"Did you know African Americans sold African Americans into slavery?"
"So I'd encourage you to check with your history teacher and get that all straightened out."
"So you can learn history and how it truly unfolded. 'Cause, that is true history."
The-Brixon also commented:
"Note the 'African-Americans sold African-Americans into slavery,' as opposed to just Africans."
To be clear, slavery existed well before the existence of America's version of slavery.
However, African Americans were not selling other African Americans into slavery. For one, Africans living in Africa prior to being made slaves in the Americas were Africans.
Period.
The New York Times did a report, which included the difference between the African slave trade and the trans-Atlantic slave trade:
"Forced labor was not uncommon—Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries—but enslavement had not been based on race."
"The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited."
"Enslaved people were seen not as people at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited."
The slave trade within Africa was based on warfare and captured adversaries that could shift power between the slavers and the enslaved with a single battle.
But European colonial governments exploited the practice. That internal slavery was instrumental in the development and growth of European colonial administration's trade of goods and taking of resources on the African continent.
The colonial governments effectively turned a blind eye to local chiefs continuing the slave trade into the 1940s and 1950s.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was different.
If you're still wondering if "African Americans" benefited from enslaved Africans brought by European colonists to the Western hemisphere, they didn't. The majority benefit from the lifelong enslavement of Black people in the Western hemisphere went to White colonizers and the European nations participating in the slave trade.
The substitute teacher's false claims feature heavily in rhetoric spread by White supremacists and White nationalists. She tried to use the same whitewashed history to teach Black students a lesson in history.
Her misinformation was not well received.
Several students chose to walk out. At the end of the video, a student was seen erasing the "All Lives Matter" the substitute added to the whiteboard.
The substitute said:
"Okay, ma'am. I'm going to have to send you to the office because that is my whiteboard. Because I am the teacher today."
Since the video was posted to Reddit, people from all over commented on the substitute teacher's behavior.
Redditor Ishihado said:
"Does she know she probably just lost her job?"
Redditor annieweep replied:
"She's gonna have a hard time getting her whiteboard out of that class."
A teacher chimed in about dealing with substitutes:
"I'm a teacher and subs messing with my sh*t pisses me off so much."
"It's not your classroom. Stop trying to impose your random rules onto my students and stop reorganizing or messing with my sh*t."
"There's a 'do not return' list on most sub request forms and this sub definitely guaranteed she'll never be invited back into that teacher's class or any teacher who works with that teacher and agrees with BLM."
And PapaSmurf1502 replied:
"It really makes me think she wanted to be a teacher for the authority but couldn't get the job."
BobsBarker12 commented:
"GET TO THE OFFICE THAT IS MY WHITEBOARD. >:("
"Holy sh*t the fragility."
Then Clean-Soup-1247 replied:
"Being a substitute teacher is like the least power you have in the United States, imagine trying to take advantage of THAT amount of power."
We don't have the full story on the consequences the substitute or the students may have faced, but we hope the substitute won't be trying to teach history again any time soon.