A Diversity-Training Tool We Don't Need(kids need to experience prejudice to understand prejudice?)

Sacbee.com ^ | June 18, 2004 | LINDA SEEBACH

[fight_truth_decay]

(SH) - One of the more sadistic exercises practiced by some operators who drive the diversity machine goes by the name "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes." You may have heard of it, because an elementary-school teacher in Iowa first perpetrated it on her fourth-graders in 1968 and it quickly became notorious.

Jane Elliott divided her students into two groups based on their eye color. The blue-eyed children were forced to wear collars symbolizing inferiority, and were constantly humiliated by the brown-eyed children, egged on by their teacher. Elliott once told an interviewer, "It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were." She described how one of the blue-eyed girls changed from a "brilliant, self-confident carefree, excited little girl to a frightened, timid, uncertain little almost-person." You would think that any normal person would realize that she had just done an evil thing. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise, hawking workshops, lectures, books and videos. You can find her on the Web, but I won't give you the address because I think she is a disgrace.

Here's how her Web site advertises the workshop: "This is a one-day seminar in which participants will be exposed to an exercise in discrimination based on eye color. Blue-eyed participants will be identified as the inferior group and all the negative stereotypes ordinarily applied to people of color and women by white people and men will be applied to them. Those people having green or hazel eyes will be designated inferior or superior as the instructor sees fit." One of the many companies that sell her videos describes the results this way: "In just a few hours, we watch grown professionals become distracted and despondent, stumbling over the simplest commands." Why am I telling you about this now? Because an extremely and righteously angry woman wrote me recently that her son, a ninth-grader at Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, Colo., had been subjected to this abusive treatment in his English literature class, which was studying "Othello."

[sharktrager]

Not quite the same as the Wong's living next door to the Chavez family.

[mrustow]

"Elliott chose of eye colour because during the second world war eye colour was one of the ways for the nazi's to determine if someone was send to the gas chamber or not. Brown eyes could be fatal even if you had a beautiful German name. "I had no idea how it would work out. If I had known the enormous impact it had on my students and the community, I would not have done it." says Elliott. As a direct result of the success' of the exercise her four children were taunted, spit on and molested by their teachers, their classmates and the parents of their classmates. "From get the Elliott kids it became get the nigger-lover's kids" says Elliott."

She lied about the Nazis, and I have no doubt that she lied about her own kids. People didn't get sent to the gas chambers because of the color of their eyes, but because they were Jews, Slavs, or gypsies. As for her children being terrorized, I know of conservatives whose children were so terrorized, but no leftists. Leftist educators have a history of terrorizing the children of conservatives, and I believe Elliott stole that history for herself.

[spodefly]

Jane Elliott divided her students into two groups based on their eye color. The blue-eyed children were forced to wear collars symbolizing inferiority, and were constantly humiliated by the brown-eyed children, egged on by their teacher.

I remember thinking from the first time I heard about this "Blue eye/Brown eye" experiment that it was crap ... everyone knows it's us with green eyes that are superior.

[junta]

Do that to my kid and you better have a plastic surgeon on retainer. This fanatic is straight from the North Korean school of interogation.

[cyborg]

In a public school, they would do it without your permission because they know what's better for your kids than you. All the more reason to opt out of public schools and either send them to private ones or homeschool. I feel sorry for the kids that have no choice. They'll be subjected to this rubbish.

[Siamese Princess]

I would like to see a day where there are no hyphens and everyone is just an American. I don't think we should have to have a terrorist attack for that to happen.

I agree with you 100%.

[Siamese Princess]

People that want to project an image should not be surprised when people make on-the-fly judgements based on their clothes, banter, gestures. Don't want to be judged as a gangbanger, don't dress like one.

You are right, too. I couldn't put it better myself.

[gcruse]

For millenia (as far as we have records, starting with schools in ancient China - Confucius comes to mind) mankind educated its offspring without any specific diversity education.

LOL  And we know how diverse China was.   Not.

[GSlob]

It is simply that still earlier educational records (Sumerian cuneiform pottery shards and Egyptian papyri from their corresponding schools) are too fragmentary to present a coherent picture. Confucian China is the earliest society which left a reasonably complete educational record of itself. Greeks and Romans chronologically came a tad behind. Their societies contained much more than "outer barbarians, bearing tribute" or "owing tribute, but not bearing it". They, too, did not practice diversity education, for they did not need it.

[Riverman94610]

I disagree from a "streetwise"perspective that it is a rational move to cross the street when you see a group of tough looking dudes approaching.Doing that sends the message that you are scared of them and a potential"vic".
I just keep walking at a steady pace,head held high,maybe a nod or a "whats up" when I pass them.The worst reaction I have gotten is some laughter or a few joking words.
You can't be viewed as a "punk"when in the hood or in a poor white area for that matter. There,as in the world as a whole,Only toughness gets respect.
Riverman

[Oztrich Boy]

She’s taken her roadshow to Australia (“If I asked you to name ten aboriginals who made valuable contributions to the history of this country, how many of you could do it? If I asked you to name ten white males who made valuable contributions to the history of this country, how many of you could do it? That's called racism, people.”—J. Elliott),

Ignoring the gimme field of sport and painting

Music
Harold Blair: Concert Tenor, educator: '40s-70s
Jimmy Little: Gospel/Country singer actor: '50s-date

Politics Neville Bonner: Senator

Insurgents: Pemulwuy and Jimmy Governor

Soldiers: Captain Reg Saunders: company commander Korean War (an Aboriginal soldier I did not know about was the uncle he was named after, Reg Rawlings, who won the Military Medal at Morlancourt Ridge, and was later killed during Vauvillers in 1918.)

“The Americans had negro officers, but they handled negro troops. Sometimes it was suggested to me that Australia should have its own Aboriginal battalion. I'm dead against the idea … it would mean a line of demarcation - a separateness. They would be treated as something apart, and that would be bad.” - Reg Saunders

And add Dulcie Wilson, Jenni Grace, Dorothy Wilson, Vena Gollan, or any other of the dozen "dissident Ngarrindjeri women" who up against the alliance of the activist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Council bureauracy, leftist academics, media, and anti-development environmnetalist movemnt to expose the "secret women's business" Hindmarsh Island hoax.