The Discrimination as Persecution for Speaking Up

This is a very powerful segment of Jane Elliott, the US educator famous for the Blue Eyed series based on Nazism.   She is with a group of ‘white’ teenagers.  Her style of teaching is experiential and aggressive as she takes on the role of the oppressor.  She configures her work to enable the young people to actually feel and experience the oppression as discrimination.  She is treating them the same way a ‘black’ person would be treated.  You can replace ‘black’ with ‘women’, ‘disabled’, ‘unattractive’, ‘poor’, ‘unemployed’, ‘ethnic group’, ‘religion’ and the list goes on.  Whenever we see another as inferior.  What discrimination does is exclude.  We then choose the voices we hear the voices we ignore as it comes down to what we believe, and within that, unconscious/conscious attitudes of superiority and inferiority.

Watch this video and experience how you feel?  Do you feel empathy for the young woman? Do you regard Jane Elliott as a tyrant?  What if I was to say that she was the one who feels deep empathy as a teacher demonstrating the impact of discrimination?  She is going against her nature to inflict verbal aggression on the young woman.  The young girl was not used to being spoken to this way, whereas another type of person based on a characteristic deemed inferior would be used to being ignored.  She is persecuted for walking out, she is forced to apologise and take repsonsibility for racism.  It is not to say it is her fault but the experience is so powerful she will never see ‘black’ people the same again.

I have experienced being ignored.  I have experienced exclusion.  I have experienced judgement.  I have felt invisible.  I know it powerfully.  It has been through my experiences that I have been given a deep insight into equality.  I am homeless now and I am unemployed.  I am experiencing what this is like, what opportunities open up, what don’t. Do I have friends, do people judge me, am I rejected or do others project onto me what I should be doing.  Am I a failure?  I use my life to in-form my awareness of the reality of the experience of the wider family.  All the teachers I have had I feel a deep sense of love and gratitude as life has a wisdom inherent within it, which I can see.  I learn constantly from life.  This is education where experience is part of learning. This includes emotional intelligence rather than simply intellectual dissecting of subject matter.  You can never know a subject unless you go through it.  My REAL HOPE program was designed to give children an experience to learn and integrate – responsibility, empathy, awareness, love, honesty, oneness, peace, enjoyment and service.  I use Jane Elliott’s work in my program.  Refer http://schools.worldpeacefull.com/anti-bullying/

What do you think or feel about this?

Mohandas Gandhi

“Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong”

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