Posted today on CommercialAppeal.com:
When I was 8 or so, I was uninvited to a white Sunday school classmate's birthday party. Her parents told mine it was because a relative didn't like black people.
Until I left Memphis for college, I saw this white family at church every Sunday; sometimes her parents were leading the praise and worship service.
To this day, every time I see this girl, now married with children of her own, I am reminded that I could not celebrate her birthday with her because I am black.
If you are white and that evokes an emotion, what do you feel? Anger that a child could be treated so harshly?
Or anger because I brought up the past and just the other day, the black employees at Burger King were rude to you. And you have to deal with discrimination too, this being a majority-black town?
The latter response, educator Jane Elliott told me Thursday, is a sad reflection of the refusal of some white people to believe black people's reality.
"When a person of color tells me what happened to them, I say, 'Tell me more, because I need to know more because they (white people) will believe me when I say it.'" Her words will carry authority, Elliott says, simply because she is white.
...
I don't want sympathy, just the respect that I know my reality more than you ever could. More than anyone else I've seen, Elliott makes this clear.
She's the creator of the legendary "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" experiment. She tried it first on her third-grade classroom in the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, on April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Dividing her class by the color of their eyes was her attempt to show her students what it feels like to be assigned to the underclass.
The third time she segregated her class by eye color was in 1970 and the lesson was videotaped.
On the first day, she told the blue-eyed students that they were better, smarter, would get more time on the playground and could get seconds at lunch. The brown-eyed students had to drink from a cup, not the water fountain, and would endure unwarranted criticism of their behavior.
...
She'd created a little America in her classroom, one in which the discrimination experienced by people of color could not be denied, not even by third-graders.
That transformative aha moment happens for almost all of the adults who have participated in the "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" exercise Elliott has conducted around the world in the decades since.
How resistant are some white people to her message? Very. She's had a knife pulled on her, one white man hit her and others have threatened her life.
But at 73, she's not afraid. She's too busy to be frightened, not when so many have yet to walk a mile in another man's moccasins.
Comments