A Class Divided
07-11-2016, 01:23 AM
axle2152 Wrote:We still need it. I think it goes beyond racism...I mean look at Trump supporters, they want to ban Muslims from entering the country...same kind of hate it's because they're Muslim, wear "strange" hats and all the rumors. I mean it's the same kind of crap that went on with black people 60 some years ago... Think about the mentality....they're not normal people, they don't believe what I believe, all terrorists are Muslim...What I believe is just and right... << That sounds a lot like the teacher to me...
When it comes to the issue of racism, yeah we still have it... I think the problem is the average white person never experiences being discriminated against, maybe one time or another... but nothing like what they did in the classroom. I think the kids seen very clearly the problem and have allowed them to not be judgmental over the subjective...we definitely need more than that.
The problem is that while it would appear to be a simple fix, just treat everyone with the same respect you do everyone else...it is difficult if not impossible to get the people who are spreading the hate to see the forest before the trees. It will be a long time before we get there, if we ever get there. I think as long as we're dependent on corporate media to get our news and current events we're going to likely see more hate and regression, because after all division in a society is both profitable and easier to control.
How quickly we internalize negative stereotypes about ourselves is something I find very disturbing about demonstrations like this. Which reinforces how vital it is for minority and marginalized groups to control our own narratives, and why the push for greater representation is so essential.
It's also troubling how quickly those in a privileged position are to dehumanize the "other", and how quickly they are able to forget what it feels like to be marginalized themselves. When I first read about this experiment, I'd expected that on the day when the brown eyed children are told that they are better than the blue eyed children (when the day before they were told the blue eye children were better) that some of them would have been quick to defend or protect the blue eyed kids from the bullying they as brown eyed kids had experienced just the day before. But that doesn't seem to be what this experiment found at all.
I was listening to a podcast about the murder of Kitty Genovese the other day - where a woman was stabbed in Queens and multiple people saw it happen but no one intervened or even called the police to help. In high school psychology I remember learning about it and the "bystander effect", that basically says the more bystanders or witnesses there are, the less likely an individual will take it upon themselves to do something to stop it or intervene. What I hadn't known was that in the building and area that the murder happened, many people were holocaust survivors. Again, people who had suffered greatly at the hands of others and partly because many people turned a blind eye to what was happening - even they did not act to stop the suffering of another person or alert authorities to the issue.
I really like the thought "you don't know what you don't know". This explains why recent polls have shown that white people and black people have drastically different views of the state of racism in this country ( http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/2...lds-apart/ )
I think that goes into what you said about white people not facing discrimination - or even having to think of themselves as a racial group at all. There is a challenge that many people have about being able to relate across identity lines. There's been a lot of controversy in recent years about white actors being cast in roles where the character originally was a poc. Or the movie Stonewall a couple years back where the main character was a white gay man. Hollywood, as well as a few users on this site I remember, quickly jump in to defend such casting and narrative decisions because white characters are more easy to relate to (for other white people).
But more than that, lots of science backs the idea of "Racial Empathy Gaps", which shows that most of us tend to react less to the pain of people outside our racial groups than to the pain of those within our own racial group. ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/ ) And even though this is something that has been shown regardless of race, because white people are the dominant racial group in this country - if not just by number but by power, representation, and influence, it is very troubling to think of how this plays out on a systemic scale - schools, courts, police, banks, so on.
Im obviously really disturbed by the things that are happening in the USA right now. I feel like we are reaching a boiling point and that we as a society are still so ill equipped to handle any of it productively or positively. But all of this feeds into eachother. So even if experiments like what we see in A Class Divided were mandatory parts of education, how do we make sure that experience of being part of a marginalized group turns to empathy for people unlike ourselves, and how do we make it permanent and not just something forgotten immediately when we as individuals are back in a safe position of relative inclusion and privilege? If it is a part of human nature to not be as moved by the suffering of those that are different from ourselves - how do we call, and keep calling, attention to it - so that we can progress beyond those issues and actually build and maintain the just society based on the equality of all that we promise eachother this country should provide?
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