Video PBS - A Class

Video

PBS - a Class Divided

The PBS special "A Class Divided" is a documentary that provides many insights into the mechanisms into which racism and discrimination. The teacher, Ms. Elliot, divides the class based upon eye color. The first day the teacher convinces the class that the blue eyed people are the "better" people. She teaches the children that the blue eyed people are the better group because they are smarter, they act better, and they are just better people overall. The next day she switches the dominant class by teaching the children that the brown eyed people are better. Therefore each child had a chance to be a part of the better class as well as a member that was discriminated against.

The results of the experiment were pretty clear. The teacher stated that good children who were cooperative and well-behaved started acting out based on the discriminatory lines that were drawn in less than fifteen years. Children made claims that they felt superior and one child stated that "he felt like a king." Children in the out-group stated that they felt angry and frustrated. The lesson that the teacher taught was able to reproduce a scenario that was discriminatory amongst the children by simply dividing the group by eye color.

The lesson the children learned was so powerful that many of the students who participated in the lesson still remembered the lesson many years later. In a class reunion fourteen years later, the adults who were formerly in the class recalled the exercise with remarkable clarity. One class member stated that when she heard other people making discriminatory remarks, that she wanted the person to have to participate in the same exercise she experienced in class.

The exercise was also shared with other groups such as a Stanford psychology department as well as a prison population. The Stanford psychology department looked at the test scores that were collected before, during, and after the experiment and verified the fact that the students performed better when they were in the "better" group as well as after the experiment was over. When the students were part of the group that were being discriminated against, they actually performed worse on their test scores than when they were members of the other groups.

The exercise was reproduced many times and with many different groups of people. The results are all consistent with the experience of the students. It is possible for otherwise good people to perpetuate racism and discrimination without consciously deciding to. The process of discrimination can be perpetuated by social systems and people can be naturally socialized in to inequitable systems that they participate naturally cooperate with. This has several implications for all kinds of different in-group and out-group scenarios.