Table of Contents
Introduction
Learned prejudice is something that we learn over time but it is our feelings or how we feel towards a certain group. This is something that we are not born with but we have to develop a behavior to over time. Another word that is familiar with this topic as we continue is discrimination. Later on throughout this paper I will go into more depth with more topics and an experiment that went along with this topic.
The Experiment
We watched a video that dealt with learned prejudice and discrimination and an experiment that went with it. This experiment was conducted by Jane Elliott who was a school teacher in the early 1970’s around the time when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. She was trying to figure out how to explain what discrimination was because all of her students were white kids who lived on farms. Now day’s most elementary students have a kid of a different race in it and if not that then typically see one often. She began an experiment with her students and their eye color. She told them that the class was divided into two groups, which were people with blue eyes and then people with brown eyes. She continued to tell the students that the blue eyed kids were much smarter or just “better” than the brown eyed people. She was essentially making the blue eyed children more superior over the brown eyed kids. She restricted them from playing with each other on the playground because the brown eyed students aren’t good enough to be playing with the blue eyed students.
The brown eye students were forced to wear collars so that they can we seen from a distance so the teacher knows they aren’t breaking the rules. One student said that at recess he felt like “Miss Elliott was trying to take their best friends away from them.” Something switched in the children’s heads because the blue eyed students started treating the brown eyed students like they were beyond better than them and treated them like dirt. At recess one of the brown eyed boy hit a blue eyed kid in the guts because he kept calling him “brown eyes” and that made him made enough to hit his classmate. The only reason that this was took that far was simply just because she told them they were more superior than the other kids.
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Overall the kids with the brown eyes feel less about themselves and lack a lot of confidence. All of the kids had a major personality change. They used something so simple such as eye color to discriminate against them. The students with brown eyes got the chance to be the superior ones and they valued it because they knew what it was like to have to suffer through that. Jane would give her students spelling and math test every day and the kids who felt they were superior improved a ton on their test whereas the kids who were put below them did worse than usual on their test.
Whenever you have a positive attitude about the test then you will tend to do better than you typically would. Jane Elliott now travels around the world using this experiment but different examples, for example, instead of eye color she would use nose size. That was what the brown vs. blue eye experiment was all about.
Textbook Compared to the Video
Our text that I read was about the experiment I just discussed in detail. However there are some things the book mentioned that the video did not and vice versa. “In his book about this classroom experiment, A Class Divided, Peters(1971) reported that the students who were part of the original experiment, when reunited 15 years later to talk about the experience, said that they believed that this early experience with prejudice and discrimination helped them to become less prejudicial as young adults.”(Ciccarelli& White, 2015, pg 470).
How is Prejudicial Behavior Learned?
Nobody inherits prejudice behavior in any way. This type of behavior is learned from many different types of socialization. The ways be develop this behavior is through our friends, family, media, and as we have learned, our teachers. I believe that most of prejudice behavior is learned through media now days. “The media are a tremendously important source of social learning about prejudice. Members of socially disadvantaged groups have typically been underrepresented or misrepresented on TV, in popular magazines, and in Hollywood movies. Although we don’t see as many examples of stereotyped roles for Blacks and women, for example, as have been previously present, we are now bombarded with images of Black and female tokens in a largely White and male world, and inter-racial friendships that exist only in the workplace rather than in integrated neighborhoods.” (How Do We Learn Prejudice?)
How do People Discriminate?
What does it even mean to discriminate? To discriminate means to judge someone or treat them differently because of their race, sexuality, or gender. Sometimes people will make comments being discriminate but not even notice that they are doing it. Discrimination happens a lot as we see on media and basically what we see on the news just about every day. A common one we hear about a lot is blacks and whites. Blacks feel like whites mistreat them and that they don’t have equal rights. We see riots and protests all over the news about this topic and that is just one example of discrimination. “The discriminatory regime affects not only the structure of opportunities open to a social group discriminated against, like Nigerian women, but also that social meanings and status are assigned to those groups as their identities.” Ajala, T. (2017). Therefore even though there are still laws prohibiting it, it is still happening.
Conclusion
Overall, I have learned a lot throughout this paper that I have never learned before. I liked learning about this experiment that we talked about during this time paper. After I finished researching everything needed to complete this paper I learned so much because at first I didn’t know what learned prejudice was.
References
- Ciccarelli, S. K., & White, J. N. (2015) Psychology. New York: Pearson.
- Ajala, T. (2017). Gender discrimination in land ownership and the alleviation of women’s poverty in Nigeria. International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 17(1), 51-66. doi:10.1177/1358229117700028
- How Do We Learn Prejudice? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://faculty.elmira.edu/dmaluso/prejudice/prej-howlearn.html
