Jane Elliot Racism Analysis

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First of all, I would like to say that the video was very enlightening and also a reminder that we have so far to go in this world to address race issues in an effort to put an end to racism.
Several years ago I viewed the video of Jane Elliot’s experiment with her third graders and I was amazed how when giving power and superiority to a certain set of students caused them to turn on those who were their close friends only moments earlier. I think in contrast to the video we are discussing it was more understandable because children are normally easier to manipulate than adults are.
The video personally affected me in a way that it made me realize that I as a black person
I tend to not always recognize racism for what it is because it is so …show more content…

I feel that racism can be looked at as a form of bullying because those who have power are imposing their will on those with less power. The fact that at some point in the experiment Jane Elliot laid out the expectations of what she was hoping to accomplish, she still could not get some of the blue eyes to understand how racism works and how it hurts. One person went on to say that he was Native American but he passes for white, her response was black people cannot pass for white, they don’t have that privilege. Just sitting here, bought back an experience I had earlier this year in a diversity seminar that was held on my job. We had a motivational speaker, a black man, Adolph Brown, come to our job to speak about diversity in the work place. This was supposed to have been a 3 session workshop but after the first session, he was not bought back. During his presentation, he began to speak about institutional racism

and asked for audience participation. He posed a question to a white elderly woman, one of our more tenured employees, and she was obviously uncomfortable as her face turned bright red.
Other people of different racial backgrounds participated, some uncomfortable some not. It …show more content…

Standardized testing has also been considered a form of racism, because it is believed to be biased in favor of people from particular cultural backgrounds. In general, an educator’s personal thoughts and ideas about racism and cultural differences can effect education because they are essentially the mode of delivery to what is taught in the classroom.
What I learned from the video is that it seems that racism seems to be non-existent to people who are not victims of racism. It was amazing to me how some of the blue eyed people could not come to grips with the fact that the whole workshop was an experiment to bring about self-awareness of how or if we view ourselves as racist. Some of the people could not fathom there being a positive outcome of the whole experience. I guess that is a fact of life, some people don’t want to see themselves for who they are.
There are several things that I take away from this video. One was that because racism is something that was taught over hundreds of years, it is deeply embedded and it actually does take something as extreme as Jane Elliot’s experiment to bring awareness to the problem today. I also take away the fact that some people live in a box and until you pull them out of the box

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