A Lesson from Mrs. Elliot

“A class divided” was a video clip on PBS Frontline with the discrimination materials that was brought by Mrs. Jane Elliot. She was a teacher in the third grade in an elementary school in Iowa. She was concerned about racism and the affair that happened to Mr. Martin Luther King Jr. regarding the issue in USA. She thought that American could not just talk about racism. There was the need to take an action to tell how bad racism is and to stop it.

The thing that could be the lesson that Mrs. Elliot taught from the very first beginning was that treat others the way you wanted to be treated regardless what color of their skin is (and the color of their eyes is of course), and what race that they come from. However, the fact that most of American tended to treat African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American differently in USA, including her the third grade students had the same thoughts.

The way Mrs. Elliot told her students about racism and about how it feels to be discriminated was to make them really experienced to be discriminated. She divided the third graders in her class into blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people. Blue-eyed people were more superior to the brow-eyed ones, they were better, they had the prerogatives, while brown-eyed did not, and they also were not allowed to play with blue-eyed in the play ground. The division was merely based on the color of their eyes.

Conflict of racism began to rise to climax when blue-eyed kids mocked at the brown-eyed, and then they had a fight. Brown-eyed kids felt like being discriminated, they were like living in the isolation, and felt like inferior to the blue-eyed just because of an unfair reason of judgment. They were also angry to be called brown-eyed. From what happened Mrs. Elliot learned that how so ingrained racism was amongst people, and how severe it was. And even the third graders could be so racist.

It occurs to me that the way Mrs. Elliot taught how ugly racism could be is one of the good ways in telling it. Experiencing how it feels to be treated as if in minority and inferior is a good way to make them realize how hurting could that be. She taught the lesson of discrimination in a real situation in which racism can possibly happen in that way. However, in my opinion the act of racism does not always come from the majority, it can come also from the minority site that they make their own prejudice to other people that they think might discriminate them. Thus, in my opinion racism can come from both sites; majority and minority, unreasonably superior and inferior. And all we have to do to vanish it is erasing all the unreasonable prejudice to other people that somehow lays in our mind in order to erase racism in the world. And through the video we can learn how to do that.
Screw differences …
Screw bad prejudice…
Screw racism...
live peacefully PEOPLE!!!