The Event: How racist are you?

[Curly]

I feel like I've had an epiphany over night after watching this documentary on Channel 4 about Racism. Definitely a must for everyone, although it will probably frustrate you!

 

Although I didn't agree with some of Jane Elliott's ideas or methods it still gave me a completely new outlook on how I see subtle racism. I grew up in an area were racism was extremely visible and in your face so I think I’ve conditioned myself to ignore the subtle racism. With my mother calling anyone who even looked at her funny "racist" I started to change my perception after all life is what you make it right? If you ignore it and keep going it's not going to effect you right?

 

See there's the problem, at one point in the doc a white school teacher asks a black lady "so what are you going to do about it?" so Jane Elliott replied " why are you asking the victim to change?" or something to that effect which made me think hang on, why am I the one having to adapt or resolve it? Have I been conditioned to think because racisms is so inbuilt in the UK you start having those defeated thoughts?

 

One mixed race man really clarified it for them by explaining that he would not visit his child's school because he didn't want people treating his child differently because they already thought she was white. When challenged as to why he was doing that he answered with "the sad thing is why someone brought up in this country would think that". That definitely silenced me!

 

I still think that some black people use racism as an excuse not to try, but I suppose that's just me trying to make lemonade out of lemons.

 

One thing that will stick with me is when the white teacher related back a story about a black child in her class that slipped and fell on her face and how the teacher was so surprised that her skin was pink underneath. I wouldn't want someone that ignorant teaching my child...will she even have a job after this I wonder?

 

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-event-how-racist-are-you

 

In The Event: How Racist Are You, Jane Elliott, a controversial former schoolteacher from Ohio, recreates the shocking exercise she used 40 years ago to teach her young pupils about prejudice. What is the controversy surrounding the exercise – and why is it still relevant today?

 

The first Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise ‘Anything you learn, you can unlearn, including racism.’ Jane Elliot.

 

On 5 April, 1968, the morning after American civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated, Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott divided her class of eight year olds according to the colour of their eyes with the aim of showing them how racist discrimination feels.

What she did next and her methods in general have been described as ‘objectionable’, ‘unethical’, ‘Orwellian’, even ‘evil’. Despite this, Elliot, now in her 70s, still receives regular requests for her workshop and many of the pupils in the class that day thanked her for helping them experience the impact of arbitrary discrimination.

 

The exercise

On that fateful day, Elliot placed blue eyed children in one group and those with brown eyes in the other, then wrote ‘MELANIN’ on the blackboard. She explained that melanin ‘causes’ eye colour, hair colour and skin colour. She also added a fabrication: melanin causes intelligence.

She told the children that the more melanin you have the darker your eyes and the cleverer you are - so brown-eyed people have the most and are better. On the other hand, she explained, blue-eyed people sit around doing nothing; you give them something nice and they just wreck it.

The exercise gradually took on a life of its own, with the blue eyes becoming more and more subjugated – gifted children were soon rendered incapable and downcast - and the brown eyes becoming confident, outgoing and, in some cases, plain cruel. Elliot then reversed the exercise and noticed that the blue eyes were far less nasty. This was perhaps because, empathetically, they hadn’t wanted to inflict the cruelty that was fresh in their mind.

 

The reaction

Word got out about Elliott’s exercise and she was invited onto the Johnny Carson show. Viewers were appalled and hundreds sent letters of complaint. One asked, ‘how dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children? Black children grow up accustomed to such behaviour, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.’

But Elliott was forthright. Her response was ‘why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?’

Back in Riceville, Iowa life became difficult for Elliott, her husband and their four children but, despite opposition, she continued teaching and carrying out the exercise. In 1970 she demonstrated it for the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1985 she gave up teaching altogether in order to focus on the exercise and in taking it to a wider audience.

The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise today

‘It's very, very difficult. Doing that exercise for me is to deny everything that I believe in for three hours or five hours or however long the exercise takes. Every time I do it I end up with a migraine headache. I absolutely hate this exercise. But more than I hate the exercise, I hate the necessity for something like this in the year 2002. And the worst of it is that the exercise is as necessary today as it was in 1968.’

 

Jane Elliott

Jane Elliott is today known as a diversity trainer and carries out her exercise worldwide to companies, large corporations and government departments. She describes the exercise as an inoculation against racism.

The exercise is set up so that blue-eyed people are isolated in the middle of the room and the brown-eyed people are sitting on each side of the blues, able to effectively keep them under surveillance at all times.

She doesn’t reverse the exercise with adults because, she says, that would put it in the category of a game.

‘Discrimination based on physical differences over which we have no control is not a game. It is a reality, and to reverse the participants' positions during the exercise would destroy the reality of the experience. I don't foresee a time when white folks in this country are going to say to people of colour, “Look, we've been in the driver's seat for about 600 years. Now we're going to give you a turn."'

A controversial exercise – divided opinions

‘I’ve reached a point now where I will no longer tolerate the intolerable. I’m a ball of barbed-wire and I know it,’ Elliot says. ‘After 30 years of dealing with this subject of racism, I am no longer a sweet, gentle person’.

She has been accused of not recognizing that social and political change has occurred since the time period in which she originally developed the exercise. According to Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at University of Pennsylvania, Elliott’s exercise teaches ‘blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites,’ and he believes that ‘in her view, nothing has changed in American [sic] since the collapse of Reconstruction.’

But Stanford University professor Philip G Zimbardo thinks otherwise. Zimbardo is the creator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as ‘guards’ humiliated students acting as ‘prisoners’ and writes in his 1979 Psychology and Life that Elliott’s exercise is ‘more compelling than many done by professional psychologists’.

Elliott remains steadfast in her belief that her approach is still relevant and expresses frustration that she still needs to do the exercise at all, saying, ‘It shouldn’t be necessary,’ she says, to ‘…say things that are difficult for people to hear. I’m not kind about it. But neither are the racists.’

 

Does the exercise work?

The academic jury is still out about the efficacy of the exercise and whether it reduces long-term prejudice or if the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits.

 

One of the few studies made was by Dr Tracie Stewart and her group and published in 2003 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. She assessed the effectiveness of the exercise in reducing college students' stereotyping and prejudice.

 

Her results were mixed. The white students reported significantly more positive attitudes toward Asian American and Latino/Latina individuals, but only marginally more positive attitudes toward African Americans.

Stewart also found that white students reported ‘anger with themselves when noticing themselves engaging in prejudiced thoughts or actions’, which she concludes is not necessarily a good thing and could prove to be ‘either helpful or detrimental in promoting long-term reduction of stereotyping and prejudice.’

Long-term results of the diversity training for adults are unknown.

 

Notable countries where it’s been carried out

Elliott has carried the exercise out in many countries where the issue of race is sensitive, including Germany, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. She fervently believes that the reaction is always the same: revealing the need to undertake it in the first place.

[BiLaaL]

Interesting program.

 

I actually prefer the so called 'in your face' racism to the subtle kind. The thoughts of the subtle racist is often more insidious and demeaning. Those who display outward signs are often simply ignorant. Whereas the subtle racist is knowledgeable but imbued with deep-seated intolerance of the other - pure ignorance is not what drives such people.

[Curly]

Well it would great if we didn't have to face any discrimination. I see your point but its all ignorance to me, if a person can honestly think someone's skin colour should affect the type of person they are. It's just conditioning...just like we Somalis have this natural aversion to being called 'madow'. It's only once you're educated that you can say yes I am madow and proud of it and even then you find your self describe a non Somali as a madow and a Somali as a Somali... isn’t that just as bad?

[Indhoos]

Wow...there was another one that was similar, but it involved adults and the funny thing was that they started to rationalize it and believe it to be genuine...One lady mentioned how everyone is always complimenting her daughter's big beautiful blue eye and nothing else. She thought that it was due to the fact the her blue-eyed daughter had nothing else to offer. The mother had brown eyes.

 

I will try to find it and post it maybe...Very interesting though.

[Malika]

Originally posted by Curly:

One thing that will stick with me is when the white teacher related back a story about a black child in her class that slipped and fell on her face and how the teacher was so surprised that her skin was pink underneath. I wouldn't want someone that ignorant teaching my child...will she even have a job after this I wonder?

You probably would have no choice in who teaches your child,all one should do is make sure that their children are firmly securely attached to them,with that bond it wont matter much what a darn teacher says or do.

 

I know many like her,with their 'fake smiles' on parent evenings..In reality the don't give a damn,actually if they had a choice,would have packed all 'trouble makers aka black kids' and shift them back to wherever they came from.

 

Respect to Jane Elliot! I applauded when she put that ***** Gurumathy[sp] on the spot after trying to play the devils advocate..She only asked him,'have you ever witnessed a lynching'..he goes..No..She says...ah!and am harsh?

[chubacka]

^ yep, love her "I don't give two flying monkeys what ppl think of me" attitude.

 

The programme started off really well when the blue eyes were being unfairly marginalised, maybe it would have worked better if she did not reveal her motives so early on to everyone, but rather discrimate against them subtly and get them used to being treated poorly, this would have taken more time but this experiment was done far too quickly and that white brown eyed woman sadly spoiled the last experiment with the test. A silly way to protest and far too late.

 

interesting that the white ppl stuck up for the other white ppl and denied that racism is basically not an issue anymore, one man even comparing it to him being a bit "chubby" thus not getting the shirts he wants!

 

Would be interesting to watch the other countries where the experiment worked a bit more how it was suppose to.