Brown Eyes Blue Eyes Case Study

1. Watch the segment between 3.30” and 18.12” of Appendix A, a video entitled “Jane Elliot’s Brown Eyes Blue Eyes” (where Elliot conducts her experiment in her Third Grade—Primary 3—class). How would you use both Charles Taylor and Beverly Tatum in discussing what Elliot uncovers from her experiment?

There is a correlation between the idea of recognition and identity. One’s identity is constructed based on recognition, or its absence, and often by the misrecognition of others. (Taylor, 1994) The issue of misrecognition or non-recognition can result in someone feeling oppressed, imprisoning him or her of a false, skewed and socially constructed perspective.

Children involved were segregated arbitrarily on the basis on a genetic difference over which they were born with and had no control over ⎯ that was a close semblance to skin color ⎯ eye color. On the first day, blue-eyed students were made the dominant group where they were designated to

Perhaps, now, we can see that Chinese is the current racial majority, making their mother tongue the dominant second language. For this very reason, Malay or Indian kids may learn Chinese as their ‘mother tongue’.

The taxi driver then moves on to commenting the need to learn one’s mother tongue language in order to understand one’s culture. The passenger also doesn’t consider herself to be an Indian simply because she doesn’t relate to any of their practices or culture. But instead, she mentions, “My culture is Malaysian. I can speak Malay what.”

We can see this idea of culture using an example involving Singaporean-Chinese. Racially, they are classified as Chinese. However they certainly differ from the Chinese people in China in terms of their practices and traditions (e.g. practice of ‘yusheng’ that is exclusive to Singaporean-Chinese). This highlights the distinction between the malleability of ethnicity as opposed to the rigidity of