In 1992, a Minnesota-based software company known for its educational hit The Oregon Trail released another simulation-style game to school districts across the country. Freedom! took kids on a journey along the Underground Railroad, becoming the first American software program to use slavery as its subject matter. Less than four months later, it was pulled from the market. In this episode, we revisit this well-intentioned, but flawed foray into historical trauma that serves as a reminder that teaching Black history in America has always been fraught. This episode was written by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd. This episode was also produced by Benjamin Frisch, and edited by Erica Morrison. Derek John is executive producer. Joel Meyer is senior editor-producer and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. We’re grateful to Julian Lucas for his expertise, reporting, and generosity, without which this episode would not have been possible. His New Yorker article, “Can Slavery Reenactments Set Us Free?,” revisits the Freedom! story as part of an exploration of the live Underground Railroad re-enactments that Kamau Kambui pioneered. Thank you to Jesse Fuchs for suggesting this topic. Thanks also to Coventry Cowens, Brigitte Fielder, Bob Whitaker, Alan Whisman, Wayne Studer, Alicia Montgomery, Rebecca Onion, Luke Winkie, and Kamau Kambui’s children: Yamro Kambui Fields, Halim Fields, Mawusi Kambui Pierre, Nanyamka Salley, and Kamau Sababu Kambui Jr. If you haven’t please yet, subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to Slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just a heads up before we begin.
This episode contains some adult language.
When Julian Lucas, now a staff writer at the New Yorker, was just a kid, he became fascinated by video games.
I had plenty of late night sleepovers playing Super Smash Brothers Melee.
It was the late 90s, early 2000s, and he played all different kinds of games.
Fighting games and computer games, educational games, racing games, and for first person shooter games.
But there was one kind he liked most of all.
Models of the world, whether it was space exploration or conquering the Roman Empire or building an ancient Chinese city.
Something that felt like I had an entire world contained on my computer that I could improvise on and modify and control.
That's what really appealed to me.
But when Julian got to college, he started thinking more critically about this medium he loved.
At a certain point, I realized that so many of these games touched on histories that should have included slavery and just completely omitted it.
The most egregious is probably a game.
I mean, it's right there in the title.
It's Sidmere's Colonization.
It was first released in 1991, and in it you play a European settler building colonies in North America and the Caribbean.
Actually, when you go to build a sugar plantation, the little icon for the character that goes and builds it is a white woman.
She looks like a pilgrim or something.
And if you go to cultivate tobacco, it's like a guy with a pitchfork and a straw hat.
In college, I really started to think about how egregious this was and thinking about the fact that I had had ancestors who were enslaved and worked on plantations, and also just learning how central slavery had been to the coming of Western modernity and the world that we live in.