This morning I went to an event hosted by my mother’s favorite women’s club, the Fort Worth Women’s Policy Forum. It’s a group of professional and/or socially active women who get together to try to work on social issues in the city such as my mother’s favorite, health care for the indigent.
The Celebrity Breakfast was held at the Omni Hotel and began at 7:30 a.m. Both myself and Dean attended. We were there to hear Jane Elliot, author of the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” experiment in which, in 1968, children in a 3rd grade classroom in Iowa were encouraged to discriminate on the basis of eye color in order to allow white children to see the effects of racism.
I thought this would be an interesting presentation and was interested to hear what she had to say. Elliot did not choose to share any information with us about her well-known experiment. She is not from around here and seems to be of the opinion that since we are in Texas, our conscience needs raising. Perhaps that is the case, but I’m quite confident that hammering for over an hour on the evils of white men is not the way to do it.
She called them “tall pink people” again and again and several times implied that they were prone to playing with themselves in public. She mocked and tried to humiliate a white man she called up on the stage for a demonstration.
There is quite a bit of irony in taking this approach in a talk where she concluded it’s important to “treat people the way that they want to be treated.” Believe me, my husband did not want to be spoken of or laughed at like this. What purpose did it serve?
The idea that there might be some hypocrisy in categorizing white men negatively in a talk generally meant to be against racial bias did not seem to occur to Elliot. She did do one interesting exercise, in which she called an African American woman on stage, with a white man, and asked them how they felt about their height, their skin color, and how others treated them in general. The fact that to be black in America is to be constantly aware of your race and to be constantly on guard against bigotry was brought home.
Still, I don’t think we should be making negative comments about one racial or gender group in order to “empower” another. I seem to remember something about MLK suggesting that he wanted to see people judged not “on the color of their skin but the content of their character.” Elliot’s rhetoric, on the other hand, was mean, unjust and had the potential and the intent to polarize and hurt people. It certainly did a lot of damage to my family today. I felt shell shocked after the breakfast, which lasted longer than I had expected. In fact, in a way it has lasted all day.
Women’s Policy Forum leadership, you might take note of that.
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Racism has always been much of a concern for me, so much so that I think I have been racist by trying too hard not to be. Right now I am learning about how my black roommate and our friends handle race. Race-based jokes and statements are the norm, always without any ill intent. This works very well, although I’m still uncomfortable with handling race. I am trying to improve my outlook.
As far as man-bashing, this is one of the main reasons I resent feminists. What really raises my hackles is indeed (dead-)white-man bashing. I was skimming a copy of “The Poisonwood Bible” (which I didn’t end up reading because it seemed too dark for me to handle at the time) and the author was complaining about how men caught a once-mysterious species (Okapi or something like that) and stuffed it for a natural history museum. “Now it is no longer magical,” the speaker injuriously declared, completely ignoring the value of natural history collections.
Maybe I remember incorrectly, and I’m quite sure I missed the point. But to a person whose research has focused on natural history collections, and who is comforted by recognizing my dead-animal-loving forbears in science, it was a tad irritating.
I try so hard not to discriminate and to accept the value of everyone else’s culture, but I reserve the right to enjoy my white western art, music, science and men.
[...] brings up some local events I have never been familiar with; and she notes that we shouldn’t forgot our logic at the [...]
Suellen, you are more honest than most, I think. A big problem in learning how to improve race relations at home and in the world is that everyday people (including yours truly) are so afraid of offending someone, they don’t feel they can talk about it. And no one tells us how to act, what would be okay, and thus we don’t know. This means the bigots are the only ones talking about this issue and the only thing I know for sure is they should be politely but firmly challenged if they air their views in my hearing. But in everyday efforts to improve race relations, it is known that saying nothing is safe. I don’t think it’s enough. Hopefully more will be revealed.