JW Frogen
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- May 10, 2009
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Jane Elliott - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jane created the famous blue eye brown eye experiment. In a period of two days she gave brown eyed students all sorts of privileges, praised them, preferred them and did the opposite to the blue eye students. In just two days the brown eyed students identified as 'us and them', they adopted an attitude of superiority, the opposite happened to the blue eyed students.
Her conclusion is that racism or ethnic division is learned and can be unlearned by this exercise.
Fair enough, but I think she is unaware of a darker truth she has revealed, one the opposite of what she was trying to achieve.
I posit this, if you can get kids in just two days to be tribal around something as trivial as eye color then you are indeed not dealing with simple learned behavior, you are dealing with biological hard wiring. These kids responded so quickly to a new us and them paradigm that it could not have simply been just learned, it must be in some way innate.
So if we add far more complex allegiances such as religion, culture, language, race, economic class, the phenomena of human division and prejudices becomes even more difficult to overcome. Such discrimination is not simply a defect of White European culture but rather an instinct of Homo Sapiens, all Homo Sapiens. It is manifested in every race and culture.
I think she proved her own premise wrong, it can not be learned or unlearned in a simple seminar, it is who we are, and we will have to use every molecule of or reason to fight our own instincts to make progress on this issue. Not just white people, all of us.
Every last one of us.
And to my mind, sadly, her experiment reveals, that is probably not going to happen writ large.
Jane created the famous blue eye brown eye experiment. In a period of two days she gave brown eyed students all sorts of privileges, praised them, preferred them and did the opposite to the blue eye students. In just two days the brown eyed students identified as 'us and them', they adopted an attitude of superiority, the opposite happened to the blue eyed students.
Her conclusion is that racism or ethnic division is learned and can be unlearned by this exercise.
Fair enough, but I think she is unaware of a darker truth she has revealed, one the opposite of what she was trying to achieve.
I posit this, if you can get kids in just two days to be tribal around something as trivial as eye color then you are indeed not dealing with simple learned behavior, you are dealing with biological hard wiring. These kids responded so quickly to a new us and them paradigm that it could not have simply been just learned, it must be in some way innate.
So if we add far more complex allegiances such as religion, culture, language, race, economic class, the phenomena of human division and prejudices becomes even more difficult to overcome. Such discrimination is not simply a defect of White European culture but rather an instinct of Homo Sapiens, all Homo Sapiens. It is manifested in every race and culture.
I think she proved her own premise wrong, it can not be learned or unlearned in a simple seminar, it is who we are, and we will have to use every molecule of or reason to fight our own instincts to make progress on this issue. Not just white people, all of us.
Every last one of us.
And to my mind, sadly, her experiment reveals, that is probably not going to happen writ large.