No, you're missing the point of this part of the exercise entirely. The reason why the facilitator and whichever psychologists might be involved (I haven't seen any involved in any renditions I've watched) would tell the people who try to bow out of the exercise because they object to judging other based on phenotypes that they can't opt out is because, in real life, you can't opt out of these social dynamics. You can't opt out of being seen as part of a social group. You can't opt out of white privilege if you're white. And if you're black or a minority, if you dare to step outside your proscribed role, you're quickly put back in your place. This is what the facilitators are trying to simulate.
Thanks for responding on this. I wouldn't disagree as such with what you've said.
I haven't watch the videos you posted yet - I was concentrating on the C4 documentary, but will do so now. But I'm sure the explanation you give here applies to them, and it also makes a lot of sense as a general explanation of that part of the experiment, considered in the abstract.
However, my criticism was directed specifically at the way this segment was played out in the C4 documentary. Here, it was claimed, particularly by the tv psychologists who as massrock explained were placed in a behind-the-scenes role explaining the activity for the audience at home, that those white people who refused to take part in the exercise were really doing so because it would be other white people that they were oppressing, and that this suddenly made them feel uncomfortable.
This is an unfair interpretation in my eyes, because it assumes that they
would be perfectly comfortable with the oppression of any other race, despite no evidence at this stage being given to suggest this - indeed, from what some of them actually said when explaing why they didn't want to continue, it seemed very likely that they wouldn't be happy at all to oppress other races.
Now, one might say that, no matter what these people's personal beliefs were or even how they behaved, they were still 'guilty' of the priviledge of being white in a white-dominated and white-lead society. I think this is true in some way, though we need to be careful how we formulate it.
But this kind of 'tacit racism' is very different from the kind of explicit, active, rule-encoded racism that the people were being asked to engage in during the experiment - being rude to people, treating them in a demeaning, patronising manner, forcing them to sit in certain places, forcing them to eat and not eat certain food, and so on. That's my basic criticism, yet again: the kind of racism simulated in the experiment is not an accurate reflection of the racism in our contemporary society, and this reduces the relevancy of the experiment.
