A Lesson in Discrimination...

[liz_marcs]

Well, I'll be damned.

When I was in sixth grade, my homeroom/religon teacher separated my class into blue-eyed people and everyone else. She then proceeded to treat my blue-eyed classmates better than the rest of us. This being a Lithuanian Catholic school, more than half-the class had blue eyes.

By the end of the class, us non-blue-eyeds were angry, resentful, and acting out, while the blue-eyed kids started...well...lording it over us because we couldn't breathe without getting nailed but they could get away with all kinds of shit short of violence.

Then, at the end of the class the purpose was made clear: it was to give every single one of us an object lesson about prejudice, which just so happened to be the subject we'd tackle in religion class the following day (remember: Catholic school). Us non-blue-eyed kids were relieved. The blue-eyed kids were ashamed.

And oh, yeah, blue-eyed kids that acted like dicks? They were punished like you wouldn't believe. When they protested, the teacher kindly pointed out that they knew what they did was wrong and against the rules, but they did it anyway once they thought they could get away with it.

Years later, that lesson stayed with me.

Here's what I didn't know: It was based on an exercise that a third-grade teacher in an all-white Iowa town did in 1968.

Much thanks to jennem for the link. For years I've always wondered where my diabolically genius religion teacher got the idea.

Remember kids: The big problem with Catholic schools is that they make you think, even when you don't particularly want to.

Comments

[janedavitt.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of that exercise before but it sounds like a good way to get a lesson over to people in a way that will stick with them.

She was a brave lady; I followed the link and read about the backlash she suffered.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain that in my case my teacher didn't risk so much, in large part because nuns can be little sadists. *grin*

But it really is an object lesson that you just don't ever forget.

But, yeah, the original teacher was very, very brave...especially considering the timing of when she started the class.

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

that's a hell of a lesson to teach. I'm not surprised you didn't forget it. (And what a good teacher. Both of them.)

Thanks for the link - I'd never heard of it, either.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

It is a hell of a lesson. To this day I clearly remember it. And I'm certain that it did affect my outlook in interesting ways over the years.

It seems like such a deceptively simply concept, but even in the hour or so I had to live with it, it turns out to be fairly complex. I can't imagine doing it over the course of a few days, as this teacher did. And in 1968, no less!

[stoney321.livejournal.com]

Two lessons along the same lines, but not (unfortunately) by any teacher.

I remember in the first grade there being a "whites only" fountain in my 100 year old elementary school building. The sign hadn't come down, and the attitude hadn't changed.

I remember that same year seeing an Indian couple be turned away from seeing Superman at the theater because they didn't have their "get off the Rez" passes.

Made a strong impression on my little mind, I'll tell you what.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Huh. I've heard of that experiment, but I've never known anyone who experienced it!

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

It was only for one class, so I only got a taste.

Believe me...a taste is really all I needed.

[denny-dc.livejournal.com]

very cool (I feel like I haven't read anything positive about Catholic Schools in a while:)...I went to Catholic elementary school and Catholic College, and back in my youth, it was the best way for an inner-city kid to get an education in a relatively safe environment (okay, I still have my stories about nuns and priests), but I just wanted to say thanks for sharing:)...

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

I went to some fairly liberal Catholic schools (social justice was more of a focus in religion class) and, frankly, it was the only way to get a decent education in my city as well.

Frankly, when it came to history, literature, civics, life sciences it couldn't be beat. Unfortunately, my school tended to not be as strong in maths and some of the harder sciences (i.e., physics, chemistry).

That said...I can't deny that I got one hell of an education out of it.

As for Catholic schools, I think it almost depends on the diocese you're in and the bishop who's heading it up before you can make a judgment about the Catholic schools in that area. Given the state of the Catholic church these days *handwaves* I'd think long and hard about it.

[crossoverman.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised you haven't heard of this before. Jane Elliott is her name - and she has since done the experiment/exercise for lots of different groups in different countries. Her website. She is an amazing woman.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

Yup. First time I'd ever heard of her. *grin*

I feel somewhat dumb that I didn't know.

I can attested from first-hand experience that her lessons even in sorely truncated form, are very effective.

[crossoverman.livejournal.com]

What amazes me is when she uses the exercise on adults in corporate environments - and she still gets similar results! Grown adults can't see through the simple test she's putting them through. Of course, she's much harsher with them - making the blue-eyed people wait outside without food or drink while the brown eyed people are let straight in, etc, etc.

She did the exercise in Australia - and I wish there was some way of getting a copy of the documentary that was made for that, because it was highly charged and emotional. Adults being confronted with their latent racism is hard to watch.

[taerowyn.livejournal.com]

My eighth grade English teacher did this in prep for reading Night by Elie Wiesel, except she handed out gold, blue, and red stars. Those with gold were treated horribly/could do nothing right, the blue could do no wrong, and the red were treated normally. Some students (of all three colors) actually staged a walkout (despite threats of trips to the principal--she'd clued him in to the exercise beforehand).

[kaydee23.livejournal.com]

There was a similar social experiment out in California in 1967. It was supposed to teach about fascism, and it went awry.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_/ai_13805356

There's a novelized account of the experiment also.

http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Todd-Strasser/dp/0440993717/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222728947&sr=1-1

[norwegianne.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing the film version of The Wave when I was in middle school, when we were working through WWII. It was quite the powerful experience.

[stephanierb.livejournal.com]

I attended Catholic school as well, though we didn't have any such exercises. Too bad. I did get a superior education to what I would've gotten in public school, though.

I followed the link and read a bit about it. It says a lot about our psychological make-up and our desire for approval and belonging.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

So, I was right to see this as a good thing, then?

There were, when I was a kid, two Catholic high schools in town- St. Martin's Prep and St. Placid's Academy (one of my cousins was in the last class to graduate St. Placid's) and then for a while there was just a primary school at St. Michaels. The public schools get lazy when there's no private schools close enough to give them competition.

Julia, thinking is a good thing.

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

I have to defend public schools here. **g**

Of course, everything is different in NYC, but the private schools, including the extremely expensive prep schools tried their hardest to keep up with us. They didn't have a prayer of doing so. NYC has some of the worst public schools in the country I suspect, but the elite public schools give you a better education than anywhere else in the country.

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, we watched that movie in our orientation in college.

Problem with it was, it was used for a forum on RACE. Which. Sure. If you have a room of all-white kids, maybe you do have to play a trick of blue-eyed versus other-types-of-eyes people. But when you're in an incredibly diverse university? No.

Eventually someone got through to the administration, though, and they don't show that as their opener-to-the-race-conversation gambit anymore. \o/

[bellatemple]

I was totally about to link you to the Third Wave, but I see someone else already did.

We did an entire unit of sociological experimentation and the sort of object lessons like the racism demonstration that you describe above in my sociology class -- and yet another in my psychology class, the following year. On the one hand, they are very effective in getting the concepts across to the students. On the other, they're rather questionable ethically, considering the potential for long term trauma in the children.

Another one you might be interested in, and I need to sit down and figure out where exactly this sucker took place and find some documentation on it again, but I don't have time right at this instant, was an experiment done on the college level, looking into prison structures and the roles of prisoners and guards, in which volunteers were placed in a mock prison in the basement of a college dorm. And there's the experiment that was done in part to determine how it was that Nazi soldiers who claimed to have been otherwise moral people could have followed the orders they were given in the war. . . . If you're interested, I could probably track down that one, as well.

But, yeah, again, excellent object lesson, but actually rather dangerous psychologically. Which should really just tell us how incredibly dangerous, psychologically, the perpetuation of racism is for real. . . .

[deird1]

The prison one was the Stanford Prison Experiment. I just read about it by following lots of links from Jane Elliott to similar stuff....

[bellatemple]

Ooo, excellent, I don't even have to hunt for it. ;D

[midnightfae.livejournal.com]

We did that in my Junior High English class, too, when we were going to start learning about the Holocaust.

It's an experience I still have not forgotten.

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

We had a similar one that my catholic high school did for MLK day. I can't remember if we did it every year, or maybe just once every four years so we didn't know what was coming. I only remember it one year -- I was a senior. They gave us all index cards with a colored dot on it as we walked in school. We were told to keep it and instructions would come from our teachers. Each teacher displayed the discrimination in different ways - some just how we were sat, some you would barely notice.

Of course it was the Government teacher that went the farthest -- especially when he noticed that the kids that did the reading were all randomly selected for the minority group. He had us sit in the back, divided by three row from the rest of the class and completely ignored us during his class. Of course equally as predictably, I organized my minority group members into a staged movement to all move to the front and sit at his feet for the final 10 minutes of class. I think he was rather pleased, or at least that's how I interpreted his looking at me and laughing while shaking his head.

Also interesting was the final few teachers who reversed the discrimination after everyone had gotten used to who was going to be treated how...

[othercat.livejournal.com]

That exercise tends to backfire when one of the students is a socially maladjusted sixth grader main streamed from the "retard class" (which is the charming name the students gave the Special Ed program) who decides that her teacher is obviously a Nazi. I may have gone to my home room teacher about the "Nazi Teacher" but was told to go back to class. *sigh*

[sylo-tode.livejournal.com]

I've heard of that one. I was going to do it when I did my student teaching, but I didn't like that the version I read had the dark-eyed students getting the preferential treatment, nor was there the necessary repercussions the next day.

It's obvious that the dark-eyed students would more likely be African-Americans and this made the exercise too heavy-handed to me. Instead, I was going to give everyone a number, but there would also be a shape to go with the number and a color code. The number and the shape would be irrelevant; it's the color that would determine who got the good stuff. The seeming randomness of it would, I think, drive home the point better that differentiating like that is just stupid.

As an added bonus, I was going to take any left-handed person from the "oppressed" group and put them in with the "privileged" group. These would be the "exceptional" people that are given perks, like the minority sports stars that racists "don't mind."

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

I'm just saddened that the adults act no differently then the kids. Don't people ever learn?

[rapturesmusic.livejournal.com]

makes me wish my folks put me in catholic schools my entire life.

[omnie.livejournal.com]

We did something like this in middle school (my public middle school :D), except instead of eye color, we drew colored bracelets at random and were treated differently based on which color we drew. My memory's pretty bad, but I specifically remember that people with the same color bracelets had to sit only with each other, and there were different amounts of homework assigned to the different groups.

It was scarily effective at changing people's behavior, and was really distressing, though oddly I can't even recall which group I was in.

[rubywisp.livejournal.com]

i've seen that vid -- and a second one she did on adults, years later -- and it never fails to amaze me and creep me the fuck out. yikes.

[auntyk.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing this done to adults waiting to see an Oprah show filmed. They were segregated at the beginning (while in line) and by taping were truly angry. I don't know if it was lead by Jane but the woman doing the exercise semmed the right age group.

[nicole-anell.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I used to do anti-discrimination lectures to younger kids when I was in middle school, and we showed a video about that Iowa experiment all the time. I never knew someone who actually took part in something like it -- glad to know it made a lasting impression on you.

I always thought it was kind of mean, but an interesting idea. It's probably the best way to reach kids growing up in an almost all-white, all-Christian environment where prejudice seems like a foreign and invisible thing.

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

Nothing teaches like first hand experience. Excellent lesson. Can we have it in all schools, please?

[sneaker328.livejournal.com]

Nothing worthwhile to add other than I remember them doing this experiment in a Sweet Valley High book, only there the blue-eyeds were the mistreated minority. Jessica Wakefield did not enjoy being treated like second-class, oh no.

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

Late to the party, but my fifth -grade teacher did this- we were either studying the Holocaust or slavery at the time. The blue-eyes kids were on one side of the room, and the brown-eyed kids were on the other. She then proceeded to scream at the blue-eyed kids, making up arbitrary rules for which chairs they could sit on, how they could stand. By the time the lesson was over, I'd crept over to the blue-eyed side of the room. I didn't want to be on the side that was benefiting from the discrimination. I've always remembered that paticular lesson.