Film: A Class Divided
The documentary film A Class Divided has become a standard for exploring the origin of racial prejudice in a diverse society. Jane Elliott was a third-grade teacher in 1968 at the time of Reverend Martin Luther King's assassination. Elliott devised an exercise to conduct with her students to help them understand how racism and stereotyping emerge and are maintained in groups of people. Using eye color as a substitute for race, Elliott requested that the children in her classroom behavior in a prejudiced manner toward children whose eyes were a different color than their own. Essentially, Elliott replicated the behaviors observed in the larger society by providing her students with scripts, which negatively or positively labeled children according to eye color, and that were to govern the behavior of the classmates.
The exercise had a powerful effect on the children, leaving them astonished at their own behavior and that of other children. Tacit approval of stereotypical biases led to overt prejudicial attitudes and actions -- and eventually to aggressive and violent behavior based on discrimination of the key differences among the children: eye color. A seminar discussion in a prison opened...
A key consideration emerged during the filming of the documentary when Elliott and several of her former students who had participated in the exercise talked about how harmful the exercise was to children. They seriously considered the lasting impact of the exercise on the participants and concluded that conducting the exercise could be damaging to children. If this is so, then surely an associated
conclusion must be that discrimination in real life is damaging to those who experience it regularly or continuously.
One of Elliott's motivations for conducting the exercise was to help children understand what attributes of our society serve as triggers or incubators for racial bias. By attributing superior characteristics to one group and inferior characteristics to another, Elliott mirrored the
racial stereotypes about blacks and whites that are residual in society in the United States -- even today, so many years after the turbulent years of civil rights protests. The scripts that the students were bound to in their interactions created situations in which the members of the group labeled inferior simply could not succeed or
escape the cruel prejudice that became normative behavior in among the classmates who were members of the group labeled as superior. Indeed, Elliott carefully taught her students to conform to the stereotypes through her selective rewarding or punishing of the students' behaviors.
A fascinating question was formulated in the documentary regarding the complicity with which the adult prison guards accepted their roles as extremely biased authority figures and felt wholly justified in their
treatment of the black inmates. While it is comparatively simple to…
