As I watch the movie Blue Eyed along with the textbook chapter related to race, I could find that they both have the same message - Despite of devoted effort to end racism, discrimination, segregation, prejudice and stereotypes of race, gender, sexuality, age, and disability, it seems the caste perspective would stay just as before, without any major change – which they are trying to educate indirectly.
In Blue Eyed, Jane Elliott, a pioneer in racism awareness training, approach to diversity training in her unique way. She reverses treatments white and people of color receive; she actually makes whites be treated just as people of color would be treated, are being treated, or have been treated as. Jane Elliott said, in the movie, that white people do not realize that they are not treating everyone the same, while they do not want colored people to come to live in their town. They could finally realize how they were treating people of color, after physically and emotionally experiencing via the exercise prepared by Jane, and she made sure if they realized it by asking if anyone would choose to be black.
What I agreed with in the film is the unique ideas of actually experiencing what people of color have been treated as throughout a life. It is obvious that white people are known as dominant group which has major power within the society, while other people are categorized as subordinate group which is below where whites belong. Starting from the social distance between whites and people of color, people of color often experience either individual or institutional discrimination in a society by white people who would not even realize themselves as discriminators. Because of that important reason, Jane Elliott has been running the exercise, targeting white people to change. She sees the problem as solvable by white people.
What I disagreed with in the film is that she only sees one side of the problem – white people – to be solved, not the both sides together. Because she tries to solve the problem by changing white people`s thoughts or attitudes, she stands on people of color`s side and act rude and mean to white people during the workshop, pretending that they are being treated as same as people of color normally do. Some whites would realize how inequitable they have been to the people of color, but some would think the exercise as bias about whites and get mad – which will not help, but get worse. In fact, Jane Elliott has told that she has been attacked indirectly by white protestors through her family. We need to realize that we are living in an ethnic pluralism.
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I think the racism attitudes starts very early in life. Although kids tend to be colorblind in terms of lacking aversion to one color or the other - it seems what they hear and see from the surrounding adults - influences them and becomes part of their subconscious. So, I think more efforts should be put forth in schools to reduce racism. This semester we have watched a lot of videos in the classroom. I remember once we were watching an excerpt from a documentary where an elementary school teacher conducted a rough experiment: she divided her white students into two groups “whites” and “blacks” and created a situation in which “whites” were the dominant group. This kind of experiment seems useful to me if one wants to educate children about racism since it enables children from an early age to feel treatment experienced by people of color, which, in turn, might make them intolerable of racism.
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