When I was serving my mission in Switzerland, I came across quite a few people who were racist. It was really strange to meet them because I thought that racism was a dead issue. I had never met a racist person before. I totally floored when one person totally ignored the African investigator we had with us and then told in private afterwards that we should be teaching only Swiss people and that we should avoid Africans at all costs. It left a really bad feeling.
In order to demonstrate how absurd racism was, I decided to be prejudiced against people with brown eyes for a while. I called them "poo eyes." Anyway, a third-grade teacher had the same idea I had. I saw this video for my Organizational Behavior class. This was filmed right after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. When she told the kids that blue eyed kids were better than brown eyed kids, the blue eyed kids wouldn't let them play games with them, use the same drinking fountain, and more. The teacher than reversed the role and told them that actually brown eyed kids were better than blue eyed kids, and the brown eyed kids immediately started treating the blue eyed kids even worse.
It's pretty sick to think that this problem still exists today. And not only Switzerland. There are still some Americans that I know that are racists. Luckily, it's only a couple.
3 comments:
I have no problem with skin or eye color, but I might be discriminatory against that teacher's hair.
Hey it was the 60's Katie- give her a break!
I had to watch that film a bunch in my years at BYU...interesting that people are still closed-minded huh? It was hard for me to forget about racism though as every time I was dragged to Golden Corral by my senior citizen aunt and uncle that have lived in a small Utah town their whole lives they warned me about the "Mexicans" that came there...excuse me, "ran the place over". I guess if you are racist you don't think others need to eat too...?
it's interesting to me to think about what maybe I'm discriminatory about - poverty, obesity, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation - hm. it's there I think, in different ways than just racism.
Post a Comment