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Persuasive essay about discrimination
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The documentary A Class Divided chronicled the decision of a third grade teacher, Jane Elliott, to teach her class a lesson in discrimination and prejudice. Prompted by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Elliott sought an easier way to teach the abstract ideas of prejudice and discrimination to her third grade students. What originated as a simple lesson to very young children eventually left a profound effect on all those involved. Elliott’s lesson started with rules for eye color. Because of the children’s young age and Elliott’s status as their superior and their teacher, the children easily accepted Elliott’s new eye color rules almost without question and quickly slipped into their roles without hesitation with the superior eyed colored children bullying and making fun of the inferior eye colored classmates. Elliott gave the inferior eye colored children blue collars to wear so as to make them distinguishable from the superior eye colored children ("A Class Divided"). The children who wore these However, there were some adults who were not as easily swayed into discrimination. A few of the adults in the inferior eye colored group were rude, inconsiderate, uncooperative and deliberately insulting of Elliott’s instruction in the workshop ("A Class Divided"). They did not take directions from Elliott and questioned why brown eyed people, the superior eye colored adults, were better than blue eyed people, the inferior eye colored adults. Even though the majority of adults said nothing, I think more adults than third graders spoke up against Elliott because, being older and wiser, they understood and saw that Elliott’s discrimination of blue eyed people was wrong. However, out of a sense of helplessness, most were afraid to say anything that would add to Elliott’s growing evidence against blue eyed
Finally what followed was a short question and answer section. Professor Ira Berlin was so excited about getting food at the following reception that he had to be reminded about the questioning section. How much compassion does that show I wondered? I observed that most of the questions Professor Berlin received were from African-American’s though their presence in the lecture was towards the bottom of the spectrum. The majority of questions that were being asked inferred the level of political correctness in the way in which Berlin addressed certain racial issues. It seemed as though the questions were rather insignificant and that the questioners knew the answers they’d receive before they asked them. After all, wasn’t everyone in that room that attended voluntarily there for the same general cause?
Scott, Janny. “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide.” Class Matters. New York, New York: Times Books, 2005. 1-26. Print.
E. D. Hirsch and Lisa Delpit are both theorist on teaching diverse students. Both of these theorist believe that when teaching diverse students, teachers need to see their students for who they are. Seeing your students for who they are, means you look past the color of your students’ skin and recognize their culture. According to Stubbs, when teachers look at their students equally, no matter the color of their skin, then the teacher is considered colorblind (2002). Being colorblind is not a great thing because we should not treat all of our students the same, since each student is different. It is important to see our students for who they are because our classes are unique. Instead, our classes represent a rainbow underclass. According to Li, the rainbow underclass is the representation of families who are culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged (2008). In order to meet these student’s needs, teachers need to think about the struggles that each student face.
After watching the documentary, “A Class Divided,” I was very impressed by the lesson that the teacher was performing with her students. Discrimination is an issue that has been around for a long time dating back to slavery and probably before that. Over time, society has become more welcoming but discrimination still exists today and may never completely go away. By doing this exercise with her students, the teacher is changing the world. If a group of ten people went through this exercise, then they learn that everyone is the same and they stop discriminating based on race. Those ten people later go on and tell their children, friends, and family about this exercise and they may also have a change of heart. That number now changes from ten to twenty to thirty. In the documentary, the teacher mentioned that this exercise is hurtful to some people and should not be performed on everyone because of controversial issues and how it can be emotionally traumatizing for some people. A small group still does so much for a society to change and evolve. The brown eye, blue eye method has a large impact and I wish more people knew of it
It is a very educative film which students in both middle school and college should use in understanding what happened in the past. By adequately giving explicit scenes in the Selma campaign, the author marks the success of the civil rights movement because it was the catalyst behind the voting rights act passage in 1965. This helps the audience to broaden their perspectives on the understanding the mechanism and process behind the abolishment of racial segregation in the US.
Menkart, D., Murray, A. & View, J. (2004). Putting the movement back into civil rights teaching: a resource guide for K-12 classrooms. Washington, D.C: Teaching for Change and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council.
Many tend to shy away when anything concerning race is involved. The article’s title “Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools” calls the issue directly out. Everyone realizes what segregation is. There is no question that the topic should be taken seriously. Kohli relates the issue back to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, “…which mandated the desegregation of America’s public schools.” The Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education will forever be known as a highly historic and heart-wrenching decision. An emotional tactic was used as seen through an actual experience with a student. Walter Fields, the father of an African-American New Jersey student has seen firsthand the effects of tracking becoming another form of segregation. Field’s daughter scored high enough scores to be placed in an accelerated course at her high school, but was not placed in the course due to a lacking recommendation from her teacher. Fields stated “You can…look in a classroom and know whether it’s an upper level class or a lower level class based on the racial composition of the classroom.” This saying that the lower level classes are predominately comprised of African-Americans and the higher level classes are predominately comprised of white students. Therefore, reinforcing the statistics of the Racial Distribution in AP Courses at Columbia High School in which black students made up 51.5 percent of total enrollment, but only having 18.7 percent enrolled in AP courses. Unlike the 38.4 percent enrollment of white students with 69.8 percent making up the AP course
In public schools, students are subjected to acts of institutional racism that may change how they interact with other students. In the short story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by Packer, readers are allowed to view firsthand how institutionalized racism affects Dina, who is the main character in the story. Packer states “As a person of color, you shouldn’t have to fit in any white, patriarchal system” (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 117). The article “Disguised Racism in Public Schools” by Brodbelt states “first, the attitudes of teachers toward minority group pupils” (Brodbelt 699). Like the ideas in the article “Disguised Racism in Public Schools” Dina encounters institutionalized oppression on orientation day at Yale.
In 1955 Emmett Tills murder ignited a civil rights movement that would change segregation as we know.” Tills abduction and slaying had already made international headlines, and they continued throughout the week in September” (EmmettTillMurder). This quote shows how big of a dispute this became to African Americans because it showed signs that there was still segregation. “Stan...
Jane Elliot, a third grade teacher from an all-white town of Riceville Iowa, decided to give her students a very daring experiment, yet, valuable lesson over the meaning of discrimination. After the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Ms. Elliott wanted to show her class what discrimination felt like, and how it effects people.
Mary Mebane used her own experience on the bus to show how segregation affected her life. Mary Mebane points out, white people “could sit anywhere they choose, even in the colored section. Only the black passengers had to obey segregation laws.” When Mebane was young, she saw a conflict on the bus. The driver asked a black person who sat in the ‘no-man’s-land’ to move back to colored section to give the seat for the white person who was standing on the bus because the bus was full. Segregation on the bus represented how white people unequally treat black people. When black people refused this driver to move, the driver try to send them to police. Black people were living in the shadow of racism and segregation at that time. However, that situation still affects school system and community now. Mebane asserts, “It was a world without option.” Black people have lower economic and social status because they are restricted to a small box because of segregation. “In Six Decades After Brown Ruling, in US Schools Still Segregated”, Dexter Mullins claims that in some schools like Valley West Elementary School in Houston, about 90% of people are not white people. These kinds of schools do not have enough funds to support adequate school resource to these students, and these students have lower opportunities to contact with cultural diversity. Both reasons negatively impact on the
The children who were being discriminated against took five minutes to complete the flash card; however, the superior group completed the flash cards within two minutes because of the stereotyping. Because of the statement, brown eyed people could not learn brought about insecurities.... Think of a child who had to endure it thru out their elementary years of schooling; they would have learning disabilities, personality conflicts, self-esteem would be low into adulthood. A parallels form today’s society to the attitudes and behaviors of the participants in the exercise is the gay rights and blacks being killed by police in the news. (Mother,
The documentary “ A Class Divided” is about a teacher who does an experiment with different groups of people to try and figure out the effect of discrimination on society. She uses her own class of third grade students as well as a group of adults to try and see if age has anything to do with how discrimination affects society. How she does the study is by breaking up the groups into blue eyed and brown eyed people and telling them that one is better than the other. What this showed about human behavior is that if someone is told that they are better than someone they believe it. For instance, when she told the class of third graders that blue eyes where better than brown one of the children made fun of another kid for having blue eyes and this started a physical fight between them.
Because Elliott was an authority figure the children accepted what she was saying as the truth “I watched what had been marvellous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes”. The group dynamic of the class changed instantly. Blue-eyed children picked on brown-eyed ones, and banded together against them. It also affected their work, brown-eyed children's work was slower than normal and they forgot lessons they learnt the day before. One brown-eyed child said she felt “Like a dog on a leash.” They couldn't concentrate because all they was thinking about was the collar around their neck. Outside in the playground brown-eyed children became withdrawn and tended to isolate themselves from the blue-eyed children. ‘Browny’ was used as a insult “I felt like I was--like a king, like I ruled them brown-eyes, like I was better than them, happy.” Said one blue-eyed child. The next day Elliot switched the two groups around and said the brown-eyed children were the smartest today and that she was wrong yesterday (because she had blue
As a teacher, I should completely understand how to really teach my students well without any prejudices or stereotypes whatsoever and encourage them to keep learning despite the hardships they can possibly face related to either how hard they might think of the learning material is or how influential their extrinsic problems are. It is in order to make sure that they can acquire something useful from my classroom successfully. That so-called notion of teaching becomes more obvious after I encountered several affecting moments in my life. Reflecting on those experiences, therefore, I would like to share the significant occurrences in my life related to injustice and discrimination, which later on contributing to the way I learnt one particular