The Challenges Of Racism In Jane Elliott's Blue Eyed
When African-American leader and activist Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4th, 1968, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott knew she had to do something to adequately communicate the severity of racism to her students from the all-white, all-Christian rural town of Riceville, Iowa (“California Newsreel”). Deciding to give her class the opportunity to experience the discrimination that blacks go through based on the arbitrary trait of skin color, Elliott set up an exercise in which she discriminated based on another arbitrary trait, eye color. On one day, she treated her blue-eyed students as superior and her brown-eyed students as inferior, citing false evidence to support her discrimination; on the next day, she reversed the roles, using new evidence that brown-eyed people are superior to justify her change. The sharp contrast in the students’ attitudes and behavior between the two days, along with the students’ deeper understanding of the negative effects of discrimination, showed Elliott that her exercise was an effective tool to combat racism and encourage empathy for discriminated minorities. Elliott continued to conduct her “Blue Eyed” exercise in Riceville and later became the pioneer of workplace diversity training when she expanded it into a workshop for business employees. Throughout this process, though, she has faced mounting backlash for her controversial tactics within her exercise, especially from her community. I believe that Jane Elliott’s “Blue Eyed”
A Class Divided Summary
919 Words | 4 PagesIn the PBS documentary A Class Divided third grade teacher Jane Elliot tried an experiment to let a class of her third graders experience discrimination. For Jane Elliot’s third grade class in a small town in Iowa discrimination was unheard of because there was only white Christians living in the town. She separated her class based on eye color, so one day she made the kids with blue eyes be superior and the kids with brown eyes be inferior. She did multiple test to see if the way they were treated changed the way they learned. The next day she switched it, so the kids with blue eyes were now inferior and the kids with brown eyes were superior.
Analysis Of Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin
1937 Words | 8 PagesThe crowd cheered and roared when these words were delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. during his iconic Washington march speech in 1969. This was the time when America found itself torn apart in the racial conflicts. During the Civil Rights Movement, it was evident that not only black Americans but also many white Americans opposed the African American oppression. One such personality was John Howard Griffin, a Texan Journalist who documented his experiment of experiencing life as a ‘negro’ by deliberately turning his skin black through pigmentation and other medical procedures. The product that emerged out of his experiment is a book called Black Like Me.
Compare And Contrast W. E. B. Dubois And Booker T. Washington
1357 Words | 6 PagesThe Scar of America’s History: A Solution From Two Perspectives “Racism is man’s gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). Your skin color does not represent the type of person you are, so why be judged upon just that. No one can chose what color skin they will be born with, and most importantly what culture they will obtain to. Booker T. Washington was a black, middle-aged educator that believes in achieving change through patience, and tolerating your current situation in order to achieve long-term change. On the other hand, W.E.B. DuBois believes in more of an aggressive approach and directly attacking the issue at hand.
Martin Luther King's Letters From The Birmingham Jail
345 Words | 2 PagesMartin Luther King’s Jr. “Letters from the Birmingham Jail” is a powerful piece of literature that denounces racism and segregation. His eloquent articulation of segregation in America truly gives the reader a sense of what he and his people had to endure. After a few paragraphs I could already see King’s pure genius and intellect; his ideas had the ability jump off the paper and embedded themselves into one’s conscious. He made it feel as if you were living this scary, but ever so real life with him. Consequently he used this sheer power to fix an unjust system of racial prejudice, which needed to be altered.
Richard Wright The Ethics Of Living Jim Crow Analysis
509 Words | 3 Pages“She would impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom” (Wright 2). In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Richard Wright, speaks of his own experiences growing up in the half century after slavery ended, and how the Jim Crow laws had an effect on them. Wright’s experiences support the idea that a black person could not live a life relatively free of conflict even if they adhered to the ethics of Jim Crow. The first experience that Wright describes came when he was only a young boy living in Arkansas. He and his friends had been throwing cinder blocks and they found themselves in a ‘war’ against a group of white boys.
Of Martin Luther King Jr Response To Letter From Birmingham Jail
660 Words | 3 PagesI commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago” (303). Martin Luther King goes on about how very few people who were Christian regardless of their skin color failed to do anything in terms of change for equality. He also states, “They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.””(305). It is people like this who stand on the opposite sides on the spectrum who determine the amount of justice that can be done. Although some white Christians did admit that at one point African Americans would have their rights given to them not many
Kenneth Clark's A Raisin In The Sun
122 Words | 1 Pages“A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike” (Kenneth Clark). Kenneth Clark was a very important person in helping the Brown V. Board Of Education case win. Winning that case was important because a state law came into place that said separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. A Raisin in the Sun shows how Clark was right; a racist system affected the way the Youngers’ lived. The Youngers’ apartment in the Southside of Chicago: in the 1950s; significantly affected the Youngers’ lives.
A Class Divided Documentary Analysis
1170 Words | 5 PagesThe documentary titled, “ A Class Divided” introduces us to the experiment made in an elementary school in Iowa by the schoolteacher named Jane Elliot. The documentary begins with Mrs. Elliot reuniting with the students who she did this experiment with the first time. The students are much older now, and they willingly want to watch the experiment that they were part of when they were elementary kids. The experiment was done days after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs. Elliot has always thought about doing the eye color experiment, but she was never sure of when to do it. She asked her third grade student if it would be interesting to see what would happen if they were judged by their eye color.
Rhetorical Analysis On James Mcbride
1138 Words | 5 PagesRuth was unique not only because she was the only white person in the neighborhood, but the fact that she could not “stand racists of either color (30).” She believed everyone should “strive for the highest professional goals (30)” no matter what color someone’s skin color is or what heritage they
Who Is Malcolm X's Speech Appeal In The Ballot Or The Bullet
834 Words | 4 PagesImagine living in a world of segregation - constantly judged by color of one’s skin and not being permitted to associate with the “superior” race. From slavery to discrimination, African-Americans experienced this horror in daily life since the beginning of their existence. Due to the fear of severe punishment, blacks were scared to fight for equality; however, on April 3, 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio, one brave soul finally did. His name was Malcolm Little (known as Malcolm X), a widely acknowledged human rights activist. Although he supported black equality, he attacked the problem unlike others such as Martin Luther King Jr. did.
Rhetorical Analysis Of Just Walk On By
1164 Words | 5 PagesThe revolutionary Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr, once described discrimination as “a hellbound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.” His point being that African Americans face racial discrimination on a daily basis. Brent Staples, being an African American living in America, expresses his view on the subject in his essay “Just Walk on By”, where he conveys the message of how fear is influenced by society's stereotypical and discriminating views of certain groups of people; his point is made clear through his sympathetic persona, descriptive diction, depressing tone, and many analogies. Staples sympathetic persona helps the reader feel and understand the racial problems that he experiences daily.
Racism In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin
1215 Words | 5 PagesIn the story, "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin portrays Harlem as a place where people are no longer happy and have become trapped. Set after the depression and most likely during and/or after the second world war, Harlem was a time for African Americans to thrive in creative arts; but, it also gave way for poverty and a plethora of drug use. In "Sonny's Blues," the two brothers find their own ways to escape the despair of Harlem; but, through their liberation, they both ultimately complicate their relationship as brothers. Baldwin begins the story with the narrator going to work, as a school teacher, and reading news in the paper that thoroughly upsets him. The narrator at this time believes that he has escaped the entrapment of Harlem through
Jane Elliot's Experiment
596 Words | 3 PagesJane Elliot was a third grade teacher that tried an experiment with her class to educate her students on the effects of discrimination. Elliot separated her class based on their eye color in order to explain how people are treated differently in the world. She tried to find a way to explain racism in the world in a way that third graders would understand. I was actually surprised when I heard there had been an altercation on the playground the day of the experiment. A blue eyed student teased a brown eyed student which resulted in the brown eyed student engaging in a physical altercation with the blue eyed student.
Racism In America In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird
1367 Words | 6 PagesRacism in America Racism can be defined as a major problem in United States history, and can be dated back to the 1400’s. Racism can be viewed and defined in many ways, but most accurately is seen as the state of characterizing an individual based on his race, and or believing that one race is superior to another (Shah) . Racism is as big of a problem in the USA as anyone can think, starting way back to when the country had just began to form, when Europeans started settling into the 13 original colonies (Shah). Ever since then, it seems that the problem has only been on the rise, rather than the opposite. Racism has always been a major issue, although hundreds of years have passed since the birth of racism, the problem just seems to never go away.
Argumentative Essay On Racial Equality
1734 Words | 7 PagesRacial inequality has plagued our society for centuries and has been described as a “black eye” on American history. It wasn’t until the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1965 that minorities were given equal protection under the law. This was a crucial step on our society’s road to reconciling this injustice. However, the effects of past racial inequality are still visible to this day, and our society still wrestles with how to solve this issue. In 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson said: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair.
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