Ramblings: The Eye of the Storm
We often proclaim that we are fortunate enough to be living in a free world. Free of the vices of colonialism, slavery, racism and discrimination. We pride ourselves in having established a new egalitarian world order that is based upon the tenets of equality and justice. We preach the ideals of righteousness and fairness, that is, the golden rule of treating others as you would expect to be treated yourself. We take comfort in the innocent belief that all persons, regardless of their secondary identifiers such as colour, caste, religion, race, gender and sex, are treated alike.
The Constitution of India, considered by many to be a holy document, prohibits discrimination on the above-mentioned grounds and guarantees the right to equality to all persons, by way of Article(s) 14 and 15. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was aimed at putting an end to the racial discrimination faced by persons of colour. Today, historical movements against discrimination, such as the anti-Apartheid and the Civil Rights movements, are commemorated as the harbingers of equality. Discrimination, apparently, has become an alien concept to us, one which died a slow death a long time ago. It is treated as nothing but another chapter in the history books.
On May 25 of this year, however, the world was jolted awake from this fantasy with the homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis, United States. Floyd, an African-American, was murdered by police officers in an apparent case of racism and police brutality. Derek Chauvin, a white officer, knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while the latter kept pleading that he was unable to breathe. Recordings of the incident show by-standers trying to intervene and persuade the officers to get off him as Floyd became increasingly unresponsive. The murder sparked outrage on an unprecedented scale as anger over racial discrimination and the use of excessive force by police officers bubbled over the breaking point. The incident also resuscitated the Black Lives Matter movement, a campaign against incidents of police brutality against African-Americans.
The protests have since spread worldwide, with people in several countries demonstrating against police excesses on people of colour, and have also adopted a more universal theme of fighting against all forms of racial discrimination. As a part of this movement, protestors have begun to take matters into their own hands and desecrate statutes of public figures, such as Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt, who symbolise slavery, colonialism and discrimination. The statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square had to be concealed completely after protestors spray-painted the words “was a racist” onto it.
The Eye of the Storm, a documentary from 1970, is an important lesson in understanding discrimination. Based in Riceville, Iowa, the television documentary follows Jane Elliot, a school-teacher who decided to teach her third-grade students about discrimination by conducting an ingenious exercise, which is also known as the Blue Eyes — Brown Eyes experiment. The exercise was first conducted by Elliot in the year 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Elliot was of the opinion that while the children were eager to find out more, it would be hard for them to understand discrimination without experiencing it themselves. As Riceville had a homogeneously white population, she decided to segregate the class of students on the basis of their eye colours.
Stephen Bloom, in the Smithsonian Magazine, converses with Elliot and tries to capture the events of the first instance of the exercise in 1968. Elliot segregated the blue-eyed children from the brown-eyed ones and asked the blue-eyed group to wear armbands for easy identification. She explained that because of a higher amount of melanin in their eyes, the brown-eyed children were better, cleaner and smarter than the blue-eyed. Further, Elliot stressed that “blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it.” She proceeded to lay down the ground rules, which unfairly discriminated against blue-eyed children: blue-eyed had to drink out of paper cups when using the water fountain; brown-eyed could enjoy a five-minute longer recess than the blue-eyed and so on and so forth.
When the class indulged in its usual activities and lessons for the day, the brown-eyed started to berate the blue-eyed children whenever they made an error or lagged behind in class. One of the children also put up the question that how Elliott had become the teacher when she herself had blue eyes? Another child volunteered the answer, “if she didn’t have blue eyes, she’d be the principal or the superintendent.” Elliot began to observe contrasting effects of the exercise on the blue and brown-eyed children of the class. While even one of the smarter children of the class, a blue-eyed, began to make mistakes in arithmetic problems, the usually withdrawn brown-eyed children had suddenly transformed and had wide smiles.
The next day, the exercise was reversed. The brown-eyed children were now the dumb ones and they were stripped of the benefits they had received the previous day, which were passed on to the blue-eyed children. The tables had turned and it was now the turn of the blue-eyed to act superior to the brown-eyed. Interestingly, Elliot notes that the blue-eyed were less nasty than the brown-eyed had been to them, presumably because they had experienced being tormented first-hand. After the exercise, one of the children wrote, “the people in Mrs. Elliott’s room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess.” When the exercise had been reversed, the same child wrote, “I felt like quitting school. . . I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”
In the third instance of the exercise too, which is featured in the documentary, similar observations come to the fore. At the beginning of the documentary, Elliot discusses the concept of brotherhood with the class, who define it as “treating everyone as if he were your brother.” When Elliot asks if there is anyone in the country who is not treated equally, the children respond that black people are discriminated against, as they are thought to be dumb. In order to make the students understand how it feels to be discriminated against, Elliot segregates the students on the basis of their eye colour, as has been described above. On the first day, she convinces the class that blue-eyed people are the better people in the room and confers special privileges on them, such as an extended recess. Brown-eyed people were made to wear a collar and forbidden from playing with blue-eyed people on the playground. The brown-eyed were also barred from taking second helpings at lunch, which the blue-eyed children justified on the ground that the brown-eyed may take too much. Therefore, Elliot successfully created an artificial set of differences among the children on the basis of their eye colours.
The blue-eyed children readily believed that they deserved to be treated better than the brown-eyed as they were superior to them. During recess, a fight broke out between a blue-eyed and a brown-eyed boy as the former bullied the latter by labelling him “brown-eyed”, which became a derogatory term. When the class is questioned about what is wrong with being called brown-eyed, one of them responds that, “it means that we’re stupider…”
Elliot remarks, “I watched what had been marvellous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children, turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in the space of fifteen minutes!” She wonders whether this is what the children wanted to be inside but couldn’t because the society inhibits them, because for the one day those inhibitions were removed, they were ghastly.
The next morning, Elliot tells the class the she lied the previous day about blue-eyed people being better than the brown-eyed, whereas the truth is the opposite. The brown-eyed people were allowed to take off their collars and put it onto the blue-eyed people. All of the other privileges were also reversed to favour the brown-eyed children. It was observed that the group of children which was conferred with the privileges on a particular day, had an enthusiastic participation in class whereas those who were discriminated against felt hesitant in their answers. The reason why the children in the superior group performed better was that they had been told they were “better and smarter” and hence, they felt more confident about themselves and their abilities. When the group was deemed the superior one, it took them far less time to complete activities than it had taken the same group when they were deemed inferior. The children explained that they couldn’t perform as well when they were wearing the collars as it kept them from thinking and concentrating.
It is difficult for many of us to understand how people began to discriminate against each other on the basis of colour in the first place. The documentary shows us how easy it is to create an artificial divide in our minds and to make people believe that they are superior than others. Stemming from this notion of superiority is the belief that they deserve to be treated in a better manner than the others, who are inferior. Jane Elliot has been criticised severely for subjecting little children to such an “evil” exercise just to teach them about racism. However, those concerned about the effects of this two-day exercise on the children fail to consider the fact that for people of colour, this isn’t simply an exercise, rather it is their whole life. In fact, in an episode of the PBS series Frontline (A Class Divided), the participants of the original documentary re-unite to discuss the exercise with Elliot and they unanimously conclude that the exercise ultimately taught the children a valuable lesson in racism which they would not forget in their lifetime.
The battle against discrimination has to be fought on multiple fronts because this Frankenstein that we have created has numerous faces, such as racism and untouchability to name a few. In the Indian context, discrimination finds widespread prevalence in the form of caste. Manusmriti, an authoritative law-book followed in Hinduism, envisaged a Hindu society based on the four-tier caste system, which has laid down the foundation of inequality and discrimination. Today, this system of discrimination has become institutionalised in India. It seems as if the right to life that is guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to all persons does not cover the lower-caste members of society, for their lives are gambled with every day by the State itself, as it forces them to work in inhumane and life-threatening conditions.
Manual scavenging, a dehumanising practice which still persists on a large-scale in India, is a typical example of caste-based discrimination. The persons engaged to perform this task are mostly from castes which have been relegated to the bottom of the caste hierarchy, primarily Dalits. A person belonging to a higher-caste would not be found engaged in this work since it is believed that it is “below” such a person is to be working as a manual scavenger. Being a manual scavenger carries a lot of social stigma to it as they are considered to be unclean, impure and untouchable.
Another ground on which there exists widespread discrimination across the globe is that of gender and sex. The entire human history is a testament to the fact that women have strongly been discriminated against by men since time immemorial. It is very unsettling to see men act superior to women and treat them as chattel. Women have always been kept confined to household work and men have denied them every opportunity to become independent individuals. Even today, the picture is no different. An example of the discrimination faced by women is that the social norms they have to conform to, are very strict and different from those that apply to men. While many women today have access to education, they still face discrimination in the form of hostel curfew timings, dress codes and other restrictions. As long as the prerogative to define social constructs and make rules/regulations lies solely with men, women will continue to face discrimination because it has become embedded deep within the system.
Members of the LGBTQ community are often at the receiving end of a lot of prejudice and discrimination from the society. There are several factors which lead to such prejudice, such as issues with acceptance and fitting-in with others. A lot of discrimination is faced by people of this community in essential things such as gaining employment and in matters of promotion at any workplace, and also in obtaining accommodation. Access to education is also an area where the LGBTQ face ubiquitous discrimination. It is no secret that LGBTQ often have to keep their relationships and sexual orientations hidden to be able to lead normal public lives.
Discrimination has become an endemic in our lives, it is within us and also all around us. But, as The Eye of the Storm shows us, discrimination is only a creation of the human mind, which is just as easy to destroy as it was to create.
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” — Nelson Mandela.
