(Submitter’s note: This is an excerpt from a letter written in response to Jane Elliott, the teacher who first did the Blue Eye/Brown Eye experiment to teach her white students about discrimination, following her appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson following a newspaper report of the results of this experiment. A little more detail exists on the Wikipedia page, as well as quite a bit more. I’ve found no source on the author’s name.)
How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children? Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.
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I want to add, my dad took an interest in this after hearing about her on the radio this morning. He had not known that she actually did explain this experiment to her students before attempting it, that it was an attempt to teach an entire class of white kids what it’s like to be discriminated against because of an unchangeable physical trait with no connection with the claims the discrimination makes, and that the kids fully agreed to do it themselves.
Also, I considered tagging with Dunning-Kruger as well, for the serve lack of thought that went into this supposed “logic”, but decided racism was quite enough.
Mate, if humans didn’t have varied skin colors, there’s no doubt in my mind there would be racism based on hair color and eye color. This experiment by this teacher is attempting to show just how ridiculous discriminating against someone due to something as minor as skin color if you apply the same concept to eye and hair color… however, I imagine that would happen if the fascistic White supremacists get their way, they start targeting groups of whites once they run out of minorities to either discriminate or kill and use their hair or eye color as an excuse (likely the last excuse but still, as Innuendo Studios pointed out, White Fascism has a nasty habit of being absurdly self-destructive)
An unknown racist writing about the experiment IN A WORLD where blacks are the rulers of society:
“How dare you try this cruel experiment out on black children? White children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but black children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to black children and will cause them great psychological damage.”
@Peacemonger373 #47612
Well, just imagine if the white supremacists got exactly what they wanted: a white America.
Who's to say they wouldn't stop with just the colour of skin ...?
So wait… sending black kids off to a different school, to fight the Vietnam War, to juvenile detention… that’s all good, but apparently a two-day social experiment is oppressive and cruel on white kids?
Damn it all, that was so stupid I think I’ve gone crosseyed. Do they hear themselves speak? No, really, get a tape recorder and play their words back to them several times and see if that makes them do a double take. How can human minds simultaneously see and miss the point? Admit something is profoundly wrong but also (completely fail to) justify and normalize it at the same time ? Or am I simply a different species and my Venusian long-form birth certificate just got lost or something?
There may be SOME grain of truth to this, in that I don’t know if it was approved by an ethics review board or would be, as psychological experiments are required to be.
That said, everything everyone said about the letter writer is spot on.
One of the purpose of the experiment was to say it wasn’t normal: if it isn’t normal for White kids then it’s not normal for Black ones.
And, yes, there’s cases of bigots choosing additional targets: for exemple, in the 1920s, the Maine KKK was mainly based around attacking the local Catholic population.
DEAR, DUMBASSED WHITE OP-PERSON;
THAT’S THE FRICKIN’ POINT!!! IT’S TO MAKE WHITES GET AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT BLACKS GO THROUGH EVE-RY…SIN-GLE…FRICK-IN’…DAAAYYY!
AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
We need to grab these freaks and force them to do that “Black Like Me” experiment! Force a bunch of tanning pills and stuff on them and toss them into the Whitest neighborhood in the Reddest state in the reddest County!
MAKE WHITES GET AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT BLACKS GO THROUGH EVE-RY…SIN-GLE…FRICK-IN’…DAAAYYY!
Fix-It Felix jr: “You don’t know what it’s like to rejected and treated like a criminal!”
Wreck-It Ralph: “Yes I do! That’s every day of my life!”
Fix-It Felix jr: “It is?”
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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