modernistwitch:

katydidnot:

modernistwitch:

silentpunk:

modernistwitch:

criticalfeministcorgi:

[head of a corgi on alternating pink and blue background, text above reads, “White Feminists: Jane Elliott made that girl cry! What if she was abused?” bottom text reads, “New theory: what if she’s just racist?”]

submitted by thegreatbabbu

Jane Elliott’s Angry Eye video has been circulating Tumblr and white Feminists are coming out of the woodwork in droves to make up an excuse for one white woman’s racist tears but not to apologize for the tears of the WoC who were also part of the exercise.

Besides the awfulness detailed above:

The idea that being called out on your racism is somehow the same thing as emotional and verbal abuse is SUPER INSULTING to me as a survivor, too.

I am so confused, why do people think she was crying ‘because she was racist’? I mean maybe she was but I just don’t know, I think many people would cry in that situation. Also why does everyone seem to think that the exercise was intended to punish white people? Blue eyed people were the focus but there were plenty of white, brown eyed people sitting at the sides. Maybe ‘teach them a lesson’ would be more accurate? I feel like there must be two different videos…?

Who said anything about punishing anyone?

The video is about discrimination and social systems of oppression, not about blue eyes/brown eyes specifically (though obviously blue eyes have long been associated with whiteness).

From Wikipedia:

Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why “that King” (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks^{[citation needed]}. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.^[1]

On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.^{[citation needed]} The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment’s rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students’ reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes^{[citation needed]}.

At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.

The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another^{[citation needed]}. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.^[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott

i’m really confused about all this emphasis on that one girl crying, though. i don’t think it makes her racist—privileged, maybe. but it mainly just shows her being oppressed, and the point of this exercise is “oppression sux” —maybe you could read into it as her being racist because she is complicit in a system that makes others feel this way when she herself couldn’t take it, but i don’t know? that seems sort of a stretch?

idk, i think both the negative and positive attention focused on the one girl crying are weird because that has little to do with the message overall i think?

Hm.

My feeling on that is that there’s been such an enormous focus on the girl crying because that’s what happens so often when white people are forced to confront the fact that we benefit from a white supremacist society, and it’s often used as an ‘out’ to escape accountability for privilege & racist actions (whether intentional or not), and that is such an immensely frustrating phenomenon.

And I’ll say it again - yeah, it hurts a lot to realize that you’re the one who benefits from others’ oppression, no matter what you do. But tending to your feelings there is your own bag (I say this as a white person opposed to whiteness!) and it is complicated and most definitely not something that should be characterized as the responsibility of those who are marginalized by privileges you benefit from.

I don’t think that’s why she cried tbh. It’s nice and neat for people to think ‘wow that bitch must be crying out all her racism’ or something but I’ve cried like that in school when teachers have been particularly sadistic (they can/have been) to me when I didn’t bring my glasses (true story), and this is an even more emotional context than a physics classroom.