I’m getting infernally SICK of the white whiners saying Jane Elliot was being overtly cruel to the kids in that documentary.
Look, I’m going to explain this as clearly as possible.
The exercise was to teach white people/white passing people about the daily racism that POC face by putting them in a position to be discriminated against constantly. This was the point of the “A Class Divided” exercise.
Now, these students were all required to sign waivers saying that they would undergo high emotional stress from the exercise. They signed knowing that they were going into a situation that would stress them out.
As the exercise continues, after barely thirty minutes of being discriminated against, two white women have burst into tears, one of which stormed out and never came back. Elliot goes on to make the point that when people of color are in these situations where they’re fed up…WE DON’T HAVE THE OPTION TO STORM OUT AND NEVER COME BACK. For most of us, leaving could mean the difference between having a job or keeping a job and continuously facing racism/sexism/homophobia. Since the discrimination this exercise is dealing with race, I’m going to focus on that. For most of us, leaving could mean federal prison—I’m in the military, one of the biggest cesspools for all kinds of discrimination in human history. I face sexism and racism everyday, and you know what? After 23 years of facing racism and sexism, you learn to swallow the poison.
You become immune to most of the microaggressions, but sometimes, the armor wears down and you have to repair it.
The purpose of this exercise was to show you white folks that we (POC) don’t have a choice. I can’t go outside right now and be secure in the knowledge that I won’t be met with some level of discrimination based on my appearance. I can’t turn on the TV and be secure in the knowledge that representations of my race won’t be overblown caricatures or typecasted roles.
People of color don’t have the option of bursting into tears and storming off, because you—white folks—have the power to take away from us what we have. Our rights, our freedoms, our livelihood. You getting your feelings hurt by some person of color is not the equivalent to me having to swallow the poisonous racism of my teachers from middle school to college. To fucking college. That’s over twenty years of racism from people who are supposed to be responsible for my education.
You’ve probably seen on your dash all of us sharing personal experiences about the mistreatment we’ve received from our teachers, the constant judging, the fact that there is no safe place for us to go and simply be ourselves without fear of being judged and ridiculed or put under the microscope.
The point of this video was to hurt your feelings. To hurt your feelings so you can have some fucking perspective. And you know what? Your. Feelings. Don’t. Matter. It is the number one thing you should take away from this. Your feelings regarding racism against POC do not matter because it isn’t about you. You’re not losing anything having these discussions. You still get to go outside and be as white and carefree as ever. You get no sympathy from me just because a Black girl made fun of you in school one time, and suddenly you think you’ve gleaned what it means to be oppressed because of your race. Calling you a “Ginger” because of your red hair and freckles isn’t oppression. It’s mean, but in the end you still come out as privileged and white as ever. We don’t have that option. We’ve been picked on, beaten, mistreated, killed, and even if we come away from it alive, we’re not unscathed, and we know we’re just going to have to face it elsewhere from someone else.
This.
Though to the microaggressions point: I would question the word “immune” in this post. While the response to microaggressions may not be as visceral over time, studies tend to show that microaggressions do have an impact on people’s mental health and physical health even if they are not outwardly responding. For example, experiencing microaggressions tends to cause an increase in cortisol levels (stress hormone) which can negatively impact health. So even though people adapt to living in a world where they face microaggressions daily, they generally are not immune to their effects. Just want to emphasize here the seriousness of microaggressions which I think often get dismissed as “not a big deal” by people of privilege (obviously that is not what the OP is doing, but I wanted to elaborate on this for my readers).
When I say “immune” I wasn’t speaking of it not affecting us. I was speaking more so on the point that we’ve become so used to it—we’ve normalized it to such a degree, that we don’t even bother to react to it anymore, even though it wears us down every time it happens. The damage on the inside isn’t reflected in the masks we’re forced to wear because if we were to react to all the racism and discrimination we face everyday we’d be labeled as angry, overreacting, irrational, and overly sensitive.
This is why, when that white woman broke down and said “I won’t play the wrong game anymore.” I had zero sympathy for her. If she had been forced to undergo this test for a much longer period (say, an entire semester), she would have eventually gotten the point. But none of these kids got the point. It was just a “test” to them. They had the luxury of knowing it was an experiment; they had the privilege of being able to walk out the door knowing they’d never have to go through that kind of treatment ever again without their having a degree of control over it. And Elliot made it a point at the end of the session to tell them so.
I agree with your post, but wanted to clarify about the microaggressions for people reading who may have interpreted “immune” to mean not affected by them instead of not visibly affected.
I think is important for White readers to understand this because of the tendency of people with privilege to think that because someone isn’t reacting to something in a way that we would interpret as being affected by it that that means that they were unaffected (I’m thinking, for example, of how many times I have heard people say “I have a friend who is black and they don’t mind when I say ____;” which is itself a form of a microaggression as it is used to invalidate the responses/experiences of the person with whom they are speaking). Part of the reason microaggressions are so insidious and damaging to mental health is the almost demand that they be internalized or else be faced with the labels you mentioned and then the discrimination and further microaggressions for reacting to them.*
*Note: Sometimes, as the current case is, when I reblog something and add information it is not to educate the OP who already knows this, but to provide further context/information for any of my followers who may not be familiar with the topic.
