FF UK – 4th year of sociology

Lecturer: PhDr. Laura Laubeová

Multiculturalism in Western Europe and North America

Summer 2002

Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis on the 4th of April, 1968. He was forced to silence before his ”dream” could come true. His days put to end a violent expression of social phenomenon, to fight with which he dedicated his life. As he gradually gained the power to influence what people thought and insert revolutionary ideas in their minds, he became inconvenient to some in the American society. He was different, but not invisible any more. Owing largely to the successes of the affirmative action, the social situation in the United States has undergone a substantial change towards the better since then. One of the many contributors to creating a discrimination-sensitive society is a Riceville teacher Jane Elliot. She, like Martin Luther King, is the living evidence of the many times challenged phrase: ”One person can make difference.”

In general, social experiments don’t work. It is complicated to conduct social experiments into the social behavior of humans as the conductor can hardly create an absolutely controlled situation. Also, the problem of causality and the observer effect are in question. Sociology, in its first phase (till the 50’s of the 20^th century), was designated to serve as a means of societal change. In the course of time, sociologists resigned the idea of social engineering and focused rather on the description of social facts.

Jane Elliot devised and conducted herself an exercise that could be regarded as a small-scale social experiment with a specific interest. The interest behind the exercise was to explain the murder of M. L. King and consequently the phenomenon of discrimination to her class. Jane divided her class of 3^rd graders according to their eye-color in two groups: the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed (both the eye and skin-color are caused by the amount of melanin in the body.) The brown-eyed group was told to be superior and better than the blue-eyed and the rules for the day were set up unjustly in a clearly discriminatory way (similarly to those in society.) In spite of the knowledge of undergoing just an exercise, the children identified with their new roles almost immediately and started to discriminate against each other. As one of the students later said: ”Once it started you forgot it’s a project as it was such a reality.” (Blue Eyed)

Children’s behavior in the course of the experiment could be attributed to particular sociological concepts: the socialization theory and the labeling theory. In the process of socializing into culture part of which is racial prejudice and discrimination, children develop a pattern of an unconscious and unintentional racism. The 3^rd graders were asked their opinion on black people before the actual exercise commenced. Having lived in an all-white community and hence having no personal experience with black people, the children, however, referred to black people as being not as smart, clean and civilized as white people. During their socialization process, children internalized uncritically this mode of thinking through what they heard from their significant others (parents, relatives, teachers and friends) and from the media. Being one of the significant others, Jane represented the authority to her students. They believed one group was better than the other because their teacher said so. They believed black people were not as good as white people because their parents said so. Racism is also the problem of the unquestioned authority.

A persistent assigning of negative characteristics to a specific group of people makes the people start to feel negative about themselves and as a result they act in a way as if they actually possessed such negative characteristics. This consequently affects the way the group appears to other people. The students assumed black people to be worse than white people, putting labels like dirty or stupid on them. Interestingly enough, the blue-eyed group identified in the exercise with their new role of being inferior very quickly, and eventually started to feel inferior. They described they felt humiliated, depressed and aggressive. Resulting from the negative feelings about themselves, the blue-eyed group performed on an academically lower level on their ”discrimination day” than they normally did. As Jane puts it: ”It’s a simple enough equation: choose a group, discriminate against it, force it by your discrimination to look and act inferior, and then point to the way it looks and acts as proof of its inferiority.” (A Class Divided, 168)

The extraordinary exercise has made difference in many children’s and adults’ lives since the first experiment in 1968. Jane has continued to carry out the discrimination lesson up to present days. She succeeded in making people more sensitive to manifestations of racism, teaching them not to take at face value everything the authority says. Through the emotional involvement that the exercise required, she made her students aware of what discriminated people actually feel like and helped them understand their position in society. She gave them lesson not to be forgotten. After all, small-scale social experiments might work.

Peters, William: A Class Divided : Then and Now. London: Yale University Press, 1971

Strigel, Claus, Verhaag, Bertram: Blue Eyed. Iowa, 1996