Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes Racist Experiment
In this experiment, a teacher Jane Elliot who got to see the change in her students from sweet, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating 3rd graders within 15 mins. She had asked the students which people they do not treat as brothers, which they said colored people. So basically, she used her students convey discrimination with their eye colors. Blown and Blue. The first day the blue eyes were “on top” and the brown eyes were at the bottom. She told the blue eyes students not play with the brown eyes, they can not use the drinking fountain; they have to use the paper cups and they had to wear a color to show that they were brown eyes from a far. The next day it was the other way around. After the experiment was done, she asked her students how they felt, and they said sad and down, but this one child that got my attention was they he felt like a dog on a leash, another said it felt like they were chain up in a jail and the person threw the key away. This experiment, goes to show that you should be teaching children at a young age to not discriminate and treat others like they are your brother. All these children got to experience discrimination at a very young age and since they did not like it, their teacher tells them not to treat anyone differently because of their skin.
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ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to think about how both discrimination and tolerance can potentially be learned. In an article I read about the controversy surrounding Jane Elliott's experiment, one quote from a teacher who worked with her, named Ruth Setka, stood out to me: "Little children don't like uproar in the classroom. And what she did caused an uproar. Everyone's tired of her. I'm tired of hearing about her and her experiment and how everyone here is a racist. That's not true. Let's just move on" (1). Setka's response, in which she attempts to provide an excuse about sticking to a system benefiting people like her (who can "move on" simply by choosing to ignore racial injustice), was not unique within the Riceville community. Yet, it helps illustrate the reason why it was so important for Elliott to do the experiment she did. By turning discrimination into something that affected the students themselves, they could better understand it and hopefully make a conscious effort in the future to not act in the ways that made them feel bad- and that sense of understanding and conscious effort is necessary for combating racism.
ReplyDeleteI think the reason people like many of the other Riceville residents were disturbed by Elliott's exercise was because it was teaching a lesson that people with white privilege generally have the choice to ignore, but that does not mean they should ignore it. Steve Harnack, who became the principal of the elementary school in 1977, also spoke about Elliott, stating, "I don't think this community was ready for what she did ... Maybe the way to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd be doing. You must get the parents first" (1). Yet, this claim also seems to be rooted in the desire for a sense of comfort- something which must be abandoned in order to change a system in which one group lives with the privilege to ignore racial inequality while others have no choice but to face discrimination.
Elliott needed to stray from what was expected in the established school system to teach her students to think beyond what was expected of them in the real world, since all that was expected of them outside of school was not necessarily right. The hostility towards her actions relates to the fact that it is more difficult for people to choose to be uncomfortable themselves in order to better understand and thus improve the circumstances for others than it is to ignore the injustices that others are facing in order to keep themselves comfortable. Elliott perfectly sums up the importance of her experiment and the role of white privilege in others’ disapproval: “Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. But they returned to a better place—unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment” (1).
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/