Teaching Discrimination

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
Big Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchell

One of the problems about discrimination and privilege is you don’t know you are doing it or that you have until you lose it or gain it. So how do you teach discrimination?

Men will deny that they have privilege.
Whites with deny that they discriminate against minorities.
Brown eyed people will claim that they are not discrimination against blue eyed people.

There was a famous experiment* that divided people in to two group those with blue eyes and those without blue eyes.

The Daring Racism Experiment That People Still Talk About 20 Years Later
Huffington Post
Posted: 01/02/2015

More than 20 years ago, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" conducted an experiment about racial prejudice that audiences will never forget. The year was 1992 -- in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles riots that erupted after the acquittal of police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King -- and racial tensions in the country were running high. Yet, the "Oprah Show" audience members didn't suspect a thing when they arrived at the studio and were immediately separated into two distinct groups.

The division wasn't based on skin color, but eye color. "What we did was treat each group differently, discriminating against the people who have blue eyes, catering to those people with brown eyes," Oprah explained back then.

As the audience lined up to enter the studio, the blue-eyed people were pulled out of line, told to put on a green collar and wait outside. The brown-eyed people were told to step to the front of the line. Once indoors, the brown-eyed group was then treated to coffee and doughnuts, while the blue-eyed group could only stand around and wait. When the blue-eyed group saw that the brown-eyed group was going to be seated first, some became upset.

I think that this was important because it showed us about privilege and oppression.  You have to experience it first hand to really understand discrimination, it is that walking into a room and hearing the conversation stop and all the eyes turn toward you. It is that “Sir” that is meant as a putdown. It is all of those little microagressions each day.

I don’t think that a white person is the best person to teach black oppression. I don’t think that I should teach Cultural Competency about gays and lesbians, yes I know a lot about the culture but I have never experienced it first hand, the best teachers are those who have lived the life. We know first hand what it is like to lose privilege or gain it. I have know what it is like to have white male privilege and lose it. I don’t think a cis-gender person should teach Cultural Competency about non cis-gender people. I think that the "Best Practice" is for Cultural Competency be taught by a member of the culture.


So what do you think?

surveys

You can see the Frontline show “Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” here.

*This experiment thankfully could probably not be conducted today because of the emotional stress it put on the children. There are now laws and ethical standards would prohibit any experimentation on children that would cause undue stress on them.

The “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” changed the way we now view human experimentation, in 1974 Congress passed the National Research Act and the National Institute of Health established standards and requires everyone to be certified and go before an Institute Review Board before anyone can do research on human subjects. I had to be certified and go before the IRB when I worked on a grant to study AIDS/HIV in the trans community.