The melting-pot flag assignment assumed Black students had an ancestral homeland to claim.

Evidence

When I was a child—I must have been in fifth or sixth grade—a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other Black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard enough being one of two Black kids in the class, and this assignment would be just another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country, and claimed it as my own. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 175

Categorization

• SEED: A concrete personal anecdote showing how origin-story framing excludes those whose ancestry was erased by slavery — potential opening for an essay on who gets to claim an origin.
• CANDY: The image of a child picking a random African country and claiming it is a shareable, humanizing anecdote.