In this day and age, we are still facing problems with discrimination in regards to physical appearance. Unless you have been living under a rock, I'm sure you have heard or seen all of the media coverage of the police brutality occurrences and the #BlackLivesMatter protests. You would think that after decades of passing laws and making advances, our country would be more accepting, but it remains discriminatory.
This fact is especially hard for me to grasp because judging someone for anything superficial seems so irrational to me. Why is it so hard for people to understand that the appearance of someone does not make them any less of a human being?
I recently watched a documentary in one of my classes where a third-grade teacher, Jane Elliott, took it upon herself to explain the effects of discrimination to her students in the simplest way possible. After the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr., Jane decided to conduct an experiment in her classroom by separating her students into two groups based on their eye color.
On the first day of the experiment, Jane asked her class if they knew anything about colored people and how they are treated. She then proceeded to ask the class if they would like to try to understand what it feels like to be discriminated against for something you can't control. When the class agreed, Jane explained that they would be separated into two groups: blue-eyed students and brown-eyed students.
She then went on to inform the students that since she herself had blue eyes that everyone else with blue eyes was better than the brown-eyed students. Brown-eyed students were not allowed extra minutes for recess, were unable to play with the blue-eyed students and were required to wear brown collars so they were easily identifiable.
As the day went on, the blue-eyed students began to act like they were better and deserved more than the brown-eyed students. Some students even began to tease the brown-eyed students for no reason other than the color of their eyes. The brown-eyed students began to feel sad as they were now the "lower class" and being treated as so.
The next day, Jane told the children that she had lied to them the previous day. She explained that the brown-eyed students were actually the better ones. Instead of having fewer privileges, the brown-eyed students were granted extra recess time and were able to put their collars on the blue-eyed students. When tested on their academic ability the brown-eyed students completed the flash cards three minutes faster than the previous day when they were "dumber."
After the experiment concluded, Jane sat her students down to debrief them and they expressed how being separated for something so simple was silly. They felt bad about themselves for something that had nothing to do with their learning ability or their personality.
This experiment is still relevant today in my opinion. This third-grade teacher made the topic of segregation as simple as eye color, yet people still seem to think that physical characteristics of a person make them less of a human being. How come third graders can grasp this concept in a matter of two days and have it stick with them, but people still don't get it after decades?
It is hard for me to even fathom the fact that people are still making assumptions from the physical characteristics of others. Judging someone for being any color at all is like saying that orange cats are meaner than gray cats. It's silly, right?
I hope to see the day when discrimination is less prominent or non-existent in this country. I want to read the news without having to see more people killed for false assumptions made by people. What will it take for all citizens of the world to recognize and respect the differences we all have?
