|
Anubis
Calaspia
718 Posts |
 Posted - 27/10/2009 : 15:29:54
|
Experiencing discrimination – the Jane Elliott way
For those who haven’t come across it before, be sure to catch Channel Four’s How Racist Are You?, at 10.00 pm tomorrow, 29th October. I haven’t seen the programme myself, but I’m sure it’ll be worthy of your time.
A quarter of a century ago, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jane Elliott, a school teacher based in Riceville, Iowa, decided it might be a good thing for her all white, very middle class, children to experience for themselves, a little of what it might feel like to be discriminated against on the basis of their eye colour. She told the kids, that either the blue eyed or the brown eyed kids were ‘smarter’, ‘cleaner’, ‘more trustworthy’ than those of the other eye colour – and introduced, for just one day, ‘rules’ which made some kids ‘superior’, other kids ‘inferior’. The outcome of the exercise was mind boggling – Jane has continued the exercise ever since; not only in schools, but American prisons (for the ‘correction officers’) etc., etc.
The experiment was filmed as The Eye of the Storm. I can’t recall how or where I first saw it, but was immediately impressed and decided to try the exercise myself (with some alterations to Jane’s methodology), using only adult students through the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sussex. I was myself amazed at how easy it was within less than an hour to reduce a person to a virtual physical wreck just by discriminating against them in class “because they had blue eyes”. On one residential school weekend school, here in Sussex, one female student came to breakfast on the second day, in tears, from her treatment in class the previous day on a task involving cutting paper patterns in competition with those of a different eye colour. Two members of that residential class were unidentified police officers!
Following the Brixton race riots, the Scarman Report was published in the early 1980s. Arising from my residential school, I was contacted by the Police Training College at Lewes and invited to lead three lectures to Senior Officers, Sergeants and ordinary PCs – based around the theme of The Eye of the Storm. They were a tremendous success – and I repeated the exercise at Lewes for a further two years.
From early days I had been in touch with Jane and some time in 1984 (?) we met up in London – combining my showing Jane and her daughter the sights (it was their first visit) and comparing notes on the experiment. Since then, there have been several more films, a book A Class Divided and a number of extended interviews of Jane on various US ‘shows’ – at least twice with Oprah! (The Oprah interviews were shown in this country.)
There has been no contact between Anubis and Jane for some time now, but my guess is that Thursday’s presentation will be ‘more of the same’. I’m posting this simply to tell you in advance – don’t miss it and don’t make the mistake of imagining the exercise really is ‘not so powerful’ as it will be reported. It really is! I’ll be watching it – make sure you do so, as well.
|
|
Experiencing Discrimination -- the Jane Eliott way
