pianogonzology: Blue or Brown? . . .

Monday, May 10, 2021

Blue or Brown? . . .

https://asknature.org/strategy/eyes-give-360-vision/

(from Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson)

". . . after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the turmoil that followed beyond the cornfields that surrounded them, Jane Elliott decided she needed to do something out of the ordinary to teach her dominant-caste students how if felt to be judged on the basis of an arbitrary physical trait - the color of their eyes. She announced to the children that they would do things differently that day. She laid out arbitrary stereotypes for a neutral trait that, for now, in her classroom, would put a student with that trait in essentially the lowest caste. She told the children that brown-eyed people are not as good as blue-eyed people, that they are slower than blue-eyed people, not as smart as blue-eyed people, that, until she said otherwise, the brown-eyed students would not be allowed to drink from the water fountain, that they had to use paper cups instead. . . "If you do that with a whole group of people for a lifetime," she said, "you change them psychologically. You convince (some) that they are superior, that they are perfect, that they have the right to rule and you convince (others)that they are less than. If you do that for a lifetime, what do you suppose that does to them?" . . . "