racism

             In the U.S. racism has been a well known issue from racial profiling to other issues such as affirmative action, police brutality against minorities and the history of slavery and the rising resentment against immigrants. Sometimes the term is used to describe the belief that race is the primary determinant of human capacities, or a more general attitude that individuals should be treated differently according to their race. One group who has faced the worst atrocities has been African Americans. Throughout the birth of our country minorities have had to struggle to prove themselves to the superiority of whites. Blues Eyes Brown Eyes an exercise conducted by Jane Elliott portrays the affects of racism.
             Jane Elliott was a fourth grade elementary school teacher who taught a group of privileged children about stereotyping and discrimination. Her experiment Blue Eyes Brown Eyes was originated in order to illustrate how destructive the myth of White superiority was to her students. Elliott was an elementary-school teacher in an all-White town in Iowa. The month that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, her students had named him hero of the month. This confused her students because they did not understand why their hero had been brutally murdered.
             Before Elliot began her study she had asked her fourth grade students what they knew about Black people. The answers that were received were shocking but not surprising since the town they lived in was an all white town. The students responded with such answers as,They?re dirty,? and 'my father says they are not trustworthy.? These responses conformed to Jane Elliott the importance of administering this exercise to her fourth grade students.
             Jane Elliot began her study by dividing her fourth grade students into two groups. One group contained the children with blue eyes and the other contained the students with brown eyes. The students who did not have either of the eye ...

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racism. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 18:48, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/22982.html