Jane Elliott

[J.W. Frogen]

Jane Elliott

Jane created the famous blue eye brown eye experiment. In a period of two days she gave brown eyed students all sorts of privileges, praised them, preferred them and did the opposite to the blue eye students. In just two days the brown eyed students identified as 'us and them', they adopted an attitude of superiority, the opposite happened to the blue eyed students.

Her conclusion is that racism or ethnic division is learned and can be unlearned by this exercise.

Fair enough, but I think she is unaware of a darker truth she has revealed, one the opposite of what she was trying to achieve.

I posit this, if you can get kids in just two days to be tribal around something as trivial as eye color then you are not dealing with simple learned behavior, you are dealing with biological hard wiring. These kids responded so quickly to a new ‘us and them paradigm’ that it could not have simply been just learned, it must be in some way innate.

So if we add far more complex allegiances such as religion, culture, language, race, economic class, the phenomena of human division and prejudices becomes even more difficult to overcome. Such discrimination is not simply a defect of White European culture but rather an instinct of Homo Sapiens, all Homo Sapiens. It is manifested in every race and culture.

I think she proved her own premise wrong, it can not be learned or unlearned in a simple seminar, it is who we are, and we will have to use every molecule of or reason to fight our own instincts to make progress on this issue. Not just white people, all of us.

Every last one of us.

And to my mind, sadly, her experiment reveals, that is probably not going to happen.

[Swami Dring]

Them's thinkin werds.

We don't take kindly to folks what think round these parts.

[boxy]

Subtle, Dring

So, Froges, you've given up on us being able to counter "original sin" by knowledge?

Sure, it's our human instinct to look for ways to assert our dominance over others. Picking eye colour, skin colour, religious beliefs, gender or sexual preference is a simplistic, and often baseless way to classify human. Understanding human nature in this way empowers those who are baselessly set upon for meaningless differences.

[freediver]

You can unlearn it just as quickly as you can learn it. Neither behaviour is hardwired.

[IQSRLOW]

Neither behaviour is hardwired.

There you go again with baseless, unqualified assumptions

At least it wasn't a "not necessarily"

[freediver]

not necessarily

[TomB]

.......if you can get kids in just two days to be tribal around something as trivial as eye color then you are not dealing with simple learned behavior, you are dealing with biological hard wiring. .....

If it was innate it would be instantaneous hatred of anything different and we would have already bred out or culled any differences and the whole of humanity would look like me (imagine that). The fact that humanity has evolved into something so diverse in appearance and culture is proof that racism is not innate.

[J.W. Frogen]

The fact that in just two days these kids were on their way to Lord of the Flies I think suggests it was not simply learned behavior but rather deep within their evolutionary mental hard wiring; the behavior was just waiting for encouragement. It was being restrained by social convention of the class room, once that was not there it exploded in two days!

It would not simply have to be race; in this case it was eye color. I think defining it simply as a problem of race is an over simplification, race is simply one of the easiest differences to indentify as so reflexively manifest in ‘us and other’ or tribal-group division. It manifests in many others ways, religion being probably a far more consistent way through history, but also sex, areas of economic class war or resentment, language-ethnic differences, even in superficial ways such as the high school cliques, which as we all know can become violent.

That the phenomenon keeps manifesting itself, even on race in countries that have had extensive dialogues on the issue, like the US, with civil rights movements, extensive education programs to irradiate it, even government programs to economically and educationally advantage the historically disadvantaged race, yet the US is rife with racial division, not just between black and white, but black and Hispanic, even different Hispanic groups (when I lived in Southern California many Chicanos loathed new Mexican arrivals, calling them wet backs).

We look at a place like Yugoslavia which intensively attempted to eradicate ethnic division, often through authoritarian means, yet when the state fell it exploded with a vengeance, immediately, it was bubbling away below the surface all along.

Same with the ethic wars in many of the former Soviet Republics, or take even a unitary religion like Islam with very simple tenants of the unity of the Islamic community, yet Islam has been rife with sectarian division despite the early religious theology explicitly banning such behavior, most notably between Shia and Sunni. Shia and Sunni have killed far more of each other in the Iraq War than American vs Iraqi. Poor US occupational planning just let the long contained genie of hate out of the bottle.

This reveals the problem probably is one of biological reflex as much as it is culturally learned, and so as boxy asks, should we abandon reason to fight it? No, but just as we must use our reason to contain many of our irrational sexual urges and do not expect reason will irradiate them, I think it is the same with this issue.

You may be very tolerant on race yet let this biological hard wiring reign free on religion, or even political difference, thinking all the time you are a completely tolerant human being.

It is in there, in all of us. Reason will not eliminate it, just contain it.

[TomB]

You are confusing the race concept with territorial protection/expansion which quite probably is innate in all living things.

[freediver]

The fact that in just two days these kids were on their way to Lord of the Flies I think suggests it was not simply learned behavior

Maybe it just suggests they are quick learners. After all, they were uni students.