Try walking down the street with a disabled person - the amount of negative micro and macro gestures from other people is extraordinary, and its something you simply can't appreciate without having some experience of it. I think the severity of her manner and technique are a worthy attempt to simulate the effect that a lifetime of structural racism and marginalisation can have on a person.
Interesting thread, but this confused me quite a bit. To me 'negative micro and macro gestures from other people' (if they were directed at someone because of skin colour rather than disability) isn't to do with 'structural racism', it's an example of personal racism.
Structural racism, to be a meaningful phrase, I think has to refer to racism incoded in rules, laws, and perhaps in the most generous interpretation in conventions which have the force of a rule. Behaving rudely or strangely to someone in the street because of their skin colour I find hard to view as the direct application of a structural rule in this way.
I'm getting similar impressions about the show. I've not yet managed to watch it - I am going to try to although part of me is rather wary. But from what people are summarising here it seems to work by simulating structural racism - that is, applying rules which priviledge one arbitrary group and dispriviledge another.
This is in itself somewhat misleading, as in this country we have managed to go a long way, if perhaps not all the way, to abolishing this kind of direct racial discrimination by law. But it confuses things further because what it aims to do is reveal
personal racism on the part of the volunteers, that is expose racist
beliefs that they had previously denied having.
Am I getting the wrong end of the stick here? Because it sounds like the show is trying to do two things at cross-purposes to each other.
Edit: watching the show via Droid's link (thanks!), already my worries are being confirmed. They summarise her project as 'aiming to simulate a racist, apartheid-style regime': the problem with this is that racism in Britian today does not operate in anything like such a simple, law-enforced way, so the experiment is not simulating anything very relevant to our society. If they'd wanted to explore and expose current racial tensions, then they should have designed an experiment which matches the subtler ways that racism currently operates in the UK.
Will update again when I've seen more.
Edit edit: another general problem that occurs to me is that's it dangerous to assume that the way someone may end up behaving under extreme psychological conditions is their 'true' nature, and even more so to assume that it relates closely to how they behave in day-to-day life. As has pointed out, everyone is racist to some extent (and I certainly wouldn't excuse myself from that), it seems to be an unfortunate fact of human psychology. But due to a combination of reforms in the law and changing social conventions, many people have learned to 'repress' their racism (prob not the best word but couldn't think of a better one) in daily conduct, whearas the experiment creates conditions where it can reign unchecked, which is again not very relevant to real-world conditions.
Still more: I agree with those who have said the fact that the eye-colour division in this case leads to all of the non-white participants ending up on the priviledged, persecuting side seems problematic. Firstly, because it tends to undermine the claim that the division is truly arbitrary (like real-world racism); given that they would have had information about the volunteers in advance, it looks like there is actually a plan, a guiding design behind the division, and the way that she first addresses the brown-eyed group seems to confirm this. It's also a problem becasue it makes it in part about 'getting your own back' for the day, which is both a distraction from the main stated project, and probably not helpful for the people involved in the long run, because once they are outside of the experiment again they won't have anything like that kind of direct power.