Telliyah's Analysis: Every secant of the day someone has had an encounter with racial discrimination no matter what race, color or creed you are. To fully understand how someone lives you have to live the life that they live each and every day. To go through the experiences so you can understand what it is that they go through. Blacks and whites may seem similar but in all actuality they are exceedingly different. The day to day experiences that each racial group is so diverse that studies have been made just to see how different they really are. Can the color of someone’s skin really determine the many situations and dealings that life sometime’s throws at you? Questions like this have plagued the mind of many people in today’s society. Racial discrimination will always exist due to the fact that people will be ignorant to what they don’t fully understand. The racial ignorance is based on a lack of the understanding of the opposite race, education and also family values.
In “A Class Divided”, by Jane Elliott she teaches her third grade class the importance of racial discrimination and the importance of other people’s feelings. Her objective was to teach these students, even at a young age that they can impact the thinking’s of people who are different then you are. This wasn’t a planned assignment out of the lesson plan, but it was in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968. Mrs. Elliott felt that her students were affected the most because they white, suburban children living in Iowa. It was extremely important for them to understand what was really going on in the world and to see how the world viewed African-Americans at that time. Living in a time where blacks were considered inferior to white people, less than, and not worthy of living, kids would be impacted the most because they are growing up listening to this everyday and she felt that it was a time for change.
“A Class Divided”, was recorded so that the world could see what she, one teacher from Iowa was trying to do. In the beginning of the class she immediately separated her students and labeled them “blue eyed” and “brown eyed” people. The same circumstances that affected black people were placed in affect with the “brown eyed” students. They were considered inferior to the “blue eyed” students and they were also treated different as well; they couldn’t eat, talk, play with, or even sit with the “blue eyed” people because the “brown eyed” people would either, steal their things, get them trouble or they might smell. To Jane Elliott’s surprise her students seemed to forget that they used to be friends with the opposite colored eyed people and they began to treat them differently automatically. The “blue eyed” people seemed to even act more superior to them and they had the feeling that they were better.
The next afternoon when her students came in she changed things around, the ‘brown eyed” people were better then the “blue eyed” people and the exact same situations applied to the “blue eyed” people that were in affect to the “brown eyed” people just the other day. Yet again the students were racially discriminatory towards the other students. At the end of the day, everything went back to normal and the students realized that people who look different then they do feel like they felt every day.
If third grade students and understand the situations that people of a different color go through how can adults not see to understand what they are doing? Jane Elliott’s class was and will still be a example of what people can do and what can happen when you manipulate them.