This work is designed as a seminar to be carried out by a group of people. However its elements can be applied informally during any kind of conversation in which we can all become more aware of issues related to discrimination. Two of the exercises appeared in earlier postings but their inclusion here is due to their direct relevance to the issue at hand.
Introduction
Jane Elliot, a teacher in the
USA, the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination decided to continue his
work by creating an experience of discrimination in her class. She started by
telling children with brown eyes that they were better than the children with
blue eyes. The blue-eyed were excluded
from games and eating together with the brown-eyed. On the second day she reversed the roles and
sure enough it was the brown-eyed children who were excluded. On the third day she explained that there
were no differences and that she had done this as an experiment to give them an
experience of what it is like to be discriminated against.
Twenty years later the now
grown-up subjects were filmed stating how important that experience had been
for them, to learn about how not to discriminate. One of the most important conclusions was
that Jane proved that children performed at their worst on the day that they
were discriminated against, dispelling in this way the myths created by
so-called “scientific research” about differences in IQ in various ethnic
groups.
- Consider the following riddle:
A man and his son are run
over in a car accident. The father dies
at the scene and the son is rushed to hospital for life-saving surgery. The surgeon arrives at the operating theatre
and says “I cannot operate on this child, he is my son”.
- From whose book does this extract come?
“We put down briefly in
Khartoum, where we changed to an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. Here I experienced a rather strange
sensation. As I was boarding the plane I
saw that the pilot was black. I had
never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my
panic. How could a black man fly a
plane? But a moment later I caught
myself: I had fallen into the…. mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and
that flying was a white man’s job. I sat
back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts……” (See ii)
1.
Write a list of
characteristics that you have which you sometimes feel are the source of
discrimination:
2.
With internal
honesty, write a list of characteristics that others have which you are
prejudiced against. (reading is optional!)
3.
Write down a
short list of events in which you were either the victim or the agent in any
form of discrimination
4.
Group discussion,
interchange of experiences and words of advice from the group to each member based
on positive experiences of how others have managed to overcome situations of
discrimination.
5.
Meditation on the
principle (From Humanise the Earth, by Silo):
“It does not matter in which faction
events have placed you what matters is for you to comprehend that you have not
chosen any faction”.
6.
Plan for the week
with the aim of being more pro-active when realising that someone else is being
discriminated against.
ii. Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom
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