1: The first obvious case to this is when babies cry and laugh. We cry from the moment we are born, from combined situations of the new sound, light, environment, space, and temperature of the world around us. Put simply, we are born afraid, and we are born crying. On the flip side of this, we can also laugh at only a few hours old. This is very intriguing to me, as nobody ever says to babies when they are born, "Hey, this is what you do when something is funny", "This is how you react when you are happy," or "This is what we do when we are sad." A few other animals also have the capability of "laughter", but crying tears is unique to humans, as is laughing when we are pleased.
If you chose not to watch this video, I'll sum up what I found to be the most interesting points.
1: The children openly agreed that all people were to be treated equally ("like our brothers", "the way we want to be treated", etc.) except when it came to blacks and Native Americans. When the teacher asked them why blacks were different than whites, the children simply replied, "because they are niggers". The children, at such a young age, already knew what racism was.
2: When the blue eyed children were said to be dominant, all brown eyed children were forced to wear a collar. Jane Elliot understood that third graders would never understand things like decreased wages, dehumanization, and plain prejudice, so she put it in terms for them to understand. By giving them a collar and simply calling them "brown-eyes", she took away their identities.
3: Almost immediately, the blue-eyed children felt a sense of superiority. I find it most interesting that, being put in a position of power, the children, as Jane says, "went from being perfectly innocent children to being cruel, vicious little third graders". That's paraphrasing from memory, by the way, so don't think it's a word for word quote. I'll bring this idea back in my next topic.
4: If the children had different eye colors, they were not allowed to play outside together. The brown-eyed children were also prohibited from using the same water fountain, which is a blatant reference to the way blacks weren't allowed to drink with whites.
5: At recess that day, two of the children got into a fight. When Jane asked the blue-eyed tantalizer why he started a fight, he simply replied, "he had blue eyes." I think this also brings up something: I hypothesize the only reason the children were so openly prejudiced against each other was because the teacher first condoned it. When they saw an important person--someone much older and wiser than them--acting that way, it was much easier for them to conform.
6: The brown-eyed children were starting to better understand racism. The little boy who was beat up on the playground told the teacher, "When he called me blue-eyes, it was like being called a nigger." Again, paraphrasing. However, all of these children were starting to realize that something as simple as an eye color, or a skin color, has no effect on how we should treat someone.
7: Each day, the teacher had the children do flash cards. This day, the brown eyed children completed the pack in about five minutes. The blue-eyes completed them in two.
8: The switch. The next day, Jane Elliot switched the superiority, and was immediately met with the same results. The timings for the flash card packs were also seemingly reversed. Both halves of the classroom now understood--or at least, were beginning to understand--what it felt like to be a subject of racism. She had taught all of these children a very valuable thing, and showed the world a very important thing.
3: The next thing I want to bring up is the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this six-day experiment, one psychologist proved that no matter what kind of people we are, at the base level, we are animals.
4: On a lighter note, perhaps the greatest feature of the human mind is that we are always able to find hope, setting aside cases of mental illness. It could be raining outside, your grandmother just passed away, you were late for work, got yelled at by your boss, your wife is mad at you because your three year old just stained the expensive new carpet, your car got a flat tire, and you ran out of money you were planning to spend on an anniversary present getting home in a cab. Despite all of this, we will still laugh when the cat falls off the couch, when the guy in front of you stubs his toe and starts screaming obscenities, and we will still find hope in the fact that every day is new.
Our minds are brilliant and beautiful, and they take care of us very well. And I think we should all take a moment to thank our minds for getting us through every day.
