The Event : How Racist Are You?

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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Did anyone catch this on Channel 4 (sorry, UK-specific question) this week? Say what you like about the woman's methods (she split a group of volunteers between brown eyes and blue eyes, treating the former as the dominant group and the latter as the subjugated group), but as far as people's reactions to the 'task' went, it was astonishingly accurate in bringing out people's lack of empathy towards the oppressed, and the willingness of people to pretend that oppression simply is not there if it is not signposted.

Really depressing, but brilliant TV, I thought.
 
M

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
baboon2004 said:
Did anyone catch this on Channel 4 (sorry, UK-specific question) this week? Say what you like about the woman's methods (she split a group of volunteers between brown eyes and blue eyes, treating the former as the dominant group and the latter as the subjugated group), but as far as people's reactions to the 'task' went, it was astonishingly accurate in bringing out people's lack of empathy towards the oppressed, and the willingness of people to pretend that oppression simply is not there if it is not signposted.

Really depressing, but brilliant TV, I thought.
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I found it interesting how quick the blues started to defended their position.
 
D

don_quixote

Trent End
that twat at the start. boy... i think from this programme i am learning yet again that i hate all white people.

oh my fucking god, this is a teacher and she just said coloured and half caste /o\

(i'll point out i am white, since it changes the context of what i said above)
 
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B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
don_quixote said:
that twat at the start. boy... i think from this programme i am learning yet again that i hate all white people.

oh my fucking god, this is a teacher and she just said coloured and half caste /o\

(i'll point out i am white, since it changes the context of what i said above)
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The number of people who were trying to justify their own experiences as being "equivalent to racism" again shows that you can have all the sophisticated discourses around race and prejudice you like (and the UK tries to do so, to show that it is post-race or some such ridiculous assertion), but the majority of people can't show any empathy and don't understand at a very basic level.

Yeah, the teacher was a particularly stupid individual.

Some of the people on the brown-eyes team were gratifyingly eloquent about their experiences, and somehow managed to avoid twatting people from the other side when they started trotting out the "but we ALL suffer prejudice" line.
 
D

don_quixote

Trent End
i was watching on 4od and the way she tried to cover up what she was saying "i said we!!! i said we!!!" - she did say "what are you going to do about it?".

what i didn't understand was why they got bogged down in debate so quickly. when they young black lad said all blue eyed people were liars that was awesome.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
don_quixote said:
what i didn't understand was why they got bogged down in debate so quickly. when they young black lad said all blue eyed people were liars that was awesome.
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That was a defining moment in the programme.

I thought the anecdote the mixed-race guy from Birmingham (?I'm shit at identifying accents) gave would have led to a brilliantly revelatory discussion, but maybe that bit got edited out. He didn't go to collect his daughter from school, as she's a quarter black, and is passing as white at her all-white school. Explaining the concept of passing to some of the people there would've been a task and a half.....
 
M

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
Do you think that teacher will be any the wiser for watching that back? I don't think so, I can hear her voice now...

It's so strange to see people not getting it or even trying to understand the big picture.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
don_quixote said:
you have to remember that is the same as a scruffy rugby player picking up a child from school.
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My bad! Of course it is.

I don't think she will 'get it', but I do think that some other people will have. Did you catch that bit where she confided to someone else on her 'team' that she was surprised when a black child scraped herself and the scratched layer under the skin was pink?! 'Skin-deep' acquires a whole new level of meaning after that fist-in-mouth moment.

What I found amazing was the general lack of understanding of oppression, and the not seeming to understand the point of the exercise.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
I watched some of this. It was certainly interesting, but ultimately I thought it failed, for two reasons. The first is that the woman leading the expirement no longer has the same authority she once had. Of course, you could tell she had some serious steel. But compared to the archive footage shown of her totally humiliating people, she could not control the group or set the agenda. Secondly, our relationship to race and racism is different. This is not the deep south in the 1960s. This is multicultural Britain in the 21st Century. Racism is wrong. The experiment's power is that it demonstrates the experience of racism along similarly arbitrary lines to race. However, today we feel that for the most part we have already learnt this lesson. Thus the experiment needed to also convince the participants that it was relevent, and this it could not do in full.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
vimothy said:
I watched some of this. It was certainly interesting, but ultimately I thought it failed, for two reasons. The first is that the woman leading the expirement no longer has the same authority she once had. Of course, you could tell she had some serious steel. But compared to the archive footage shown of her totally humiliating people, she could not control the group or set the agenda. Secondly, our relationship to race and racism is different. This is not the deep south in the 1960s. This is multicultural Britain in the 21st Century. Racism is wrong. The experiment's power is that it demonstrates the experience of racism along similarly arbitrary lines to race. However, today we feel that for the most part we have already learnt this lesson. Thus the experiment needed to also convince the participants that it was relevent, and this it could not do in full.
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First point - I was thinking this during the programme.

Second point - the programme demonstrated the blindingly apparent, yet generally taboo, point that we have not absorbed that lesson at all in any profound way (ie recognising the pervasiveness of prejudice). The people who were resistant betrayed their ignorance of this lesson (and their inability to comprehend being the victims of holistic prejudice) at every turn. Sure it was a different setting to 60s America, but ignorance persists, and this programme neatly uncovered issues that are simply rarely, if ever, addressed by the mainstream media (passing being an obvious one).
 
grizzleb

grizzleb

Well-known member
baboon2004 said:
If this is the same experiment I'm thinking of, I don't see why it is the experimenters who are evil. It's brutish, sure, but if your intention is uncovering the underlying brutishness of people, how are you supposed to proceed?
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The basic problem I have with it is does the end justify the means? We already know that people are brutes, do we need to force the ordinary person to become a rapist to know that it happens? I mean, there is some stuff I think people should recoil from. And most psychologists I meet seem to err on the side of 'the end always justifies the means'. They're a bit power mad in my experience.

Part of me thinks that this woman enjoys conflict, power and tension and hides it under this 'uncontestable' banner of exposing racism. Obviousley racism is wrong, but I failed to see the point of it other than making the black people in the group feel empowered and give them an excuse to be nasty fucks, out of bitterness. If you think you are doing things for morally good reasons, you will do ANYTHING. And I think we all know that racism still goes on, and trying to explain in the way that it was done emphasises conflict, bitterness and victimhood over understanding.
 
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nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
grizzleb said:
The basic problem I have with it is does the end justify the means? We already know that people are brutes, do we need to force the ordinary person to become a rapist to know that it happens? I mean, there is some stuff I think people should recoil from. And most psychologists I meet seem to err on the side of 'the end always justifies the means'. They're a bit power mad in my experience.

Part of me thinks that this woman enjoys conflict, power and tension and hides it under this 'uncontestable' banner of exposing racism. Obviousley racism is wrong, but I failed to see the point of it other than making the black people in the group feel empowered and give them an excuse to be nasty fucks, out of bitterness. If you think you are doing things for morally good reasons, you will do ANYTHING. And I think we all know that racism still goes on, and trying to explain in the way that it was done emphasises conflict, bitterness and victimhood over understanding.
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It's always wise to question the ethics of social experiments. But this experiment is nothing like asking people to rape one another or become racists, is it?

I actually think it's very valuable as evidence of the fact that people have not advanced as far beyond racism/social prejudice as they believe they have. Unearthing what's already there is very different from creating something that wasn't there to begin with just for "fun."

I've never in my life met a psychologist who believed that the "ends justify the means", and my experience with them has been that they are far more sensitive than the average person to just about anything an individual might be feeling/perceiving.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I have noticed (and this is just an anecdote) that some British people seem to have a strong, visceral response against psychology and analysis. Some Americans do, too, of course.

But I think this comes from the mistaken belief that repressing bad/negative/difficult feelings is better than processing them. This is a very unhealthy attitude, according to most psycho-medical models.
 
grizzleb

grizzleb

Well-known member
Yeah, my rape comment was probably not the wisest. I didn't watch the whole of this btw, I turned it off after the first half. I dunno, obviously racism still goes on but there's a problem (for people of ethnic minority) in that you can turn any situation that involves someone behaving negatively towards you and explain it in terms of racism - whereas white people can't explain it in those terms. People are commonly dicks to each other, race or not. What I'm not saying here is that people aren't commonly the victim of prejudice, but that there's an inherent bias in how people of a black, asian etc background classify their own negative encounters with others.

I guess I'm fighting a losing battle here in that it would be stupid to say that exposing this isn't a good idea - the methods behind it didn't seem to show that it's ideals fully matched up with the practise. "Do you know how to behave white?" "Of course I do" hmmm...
 
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