Know what’s so funny about this? How the blue-eyed White folks know this is an exercise (as in not real life!) and can’t stand taking the shit people of color deal with for a couple of hours before they’re screaming and crying and storming off. They know it’s fake, and they still can’t deal!
Yet these are the people who are supposedly so much smarter than me, so much more reasonable than me, so much more civilized than me!
Seriously, she’s bawling over there because she’s getting a PERCENTAGE of what so effing many people have to deal with constantly on a regular basis. Grow the fudge up, doll face. Welcome to a different set of shoes, now walk it off. This exercise is great, and should probably be taught to even younger people. Empathy needs to be engrained in when people are young. Not hate.
Actually, Jane Elliott was a schoolteacher who developed this exercise shortly after the death of MLK for the 3rd grade class she taught. Check out A Classroom Divided.
Funny how the kids handled this better than the adults. Remember, they were in White-assed Iowa. In the 60s. There was a follow-up some 25 or 30 years later, but I can’t find it right now.
I think this exercise needs to be taught to adults, too, because I think it may serves as a reality check of not only what they say/do themselves, but understand how they enact this in roles like the workplace and, if they are around children, what they model for kids in terms of bigotry and privilege.
This should be required viewing and practice everywhere in every field. I think it really puts things into perspective.
What made me laugh is the white girl who cried and stormed off after just a few minutes of experiencing what POC have to experience on a daily basis. But I don’t think she came away learning anything from this experiment because in the end, she can go back to being white and privileged and never have to worry about being singled out like that again.
This should be an ongoing thing for an entire semester.
“My feelings were hurt”
I bet she never forgot a paper and pencils for the rest of her life.I cry anytime someone talks to me like that. haha. But this was the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.
This is an honest question: If this is true —-
But I don’t think she came away learning anything from this experiment because in the end, she can go back to being white and privileged and never have to worry about being singled out like that again.
Why teach it?
I know it’s never possible to learn about your privilege, but I do think that practices like this can be enlightening. Why advocate the continued practice of this exercise even though she isn’t going to learn anything from it? It’s an honest question, and I hope it doesn’t come across as defensive, because it isn’t. I’m genuinely curious.
I’m gonna reblog this for someone else to talk about because one White person storming out and crying versus how many who didn’t? One White person who can’t be reached versus how many who were?
