"Give them the gift of words"
"Give them the gift of words"
Helen Birke
Anti-racism programs took fourth in the US and all over the world since the times of Martin Luther King. Due to time, efforts, and correct values we have successfully achieved ethnic tolerance, and all we have to do are to empower people to carry through the anti-racism education. How was it in previous years? How was it possible to change millions of minds all over the world? Was the anti-racist education more radical?
Martin Luther King was a pastor of a Baptist church. He was a deeply religious person and human inequality hurt him deeply into the heart. The fight for civil rights he founded was also the fight against violence and for humanity, which he was concerned about. His first demonstrations were patient. Later on he organized civil rights protests and as a result was arrested. Even behind bolt and bar, he didn’t stop his inspirational fight, the next step of which was a newspaper article. It became known as a “letter from a Birmingham jail”. On August 29, 1963, King led more than twenty thousand people in a massive demonstration where he announced his famous I have a dream “speech for which he gained Nobel Prize and which changed the history forever.
During his life, he managed to inspire many thousands of people to fight for equality, for human rights, for non-violent behavior which doesn’t humiliate anyone in the world. His death provoked many people not only to continue this protest but also to protest more and gain the anti-racism in the US and the world. This was a radical part of the history. One of those, who was inspired by Martin Luther King was a teacher of third graders in a small city of Iowa. As an educator, she quickly acknowledged the importance of preventing racism in education from early years and started to act.
The experiment is simple. She, Jane Elliott, create a game for kids in which they had to divide into two groups depending on the color of their eyes. After that, she established strict rules, which each pupil had to keep precisely. The experiment lasted for a few days. Blue eyes group was allowed to enter the class only after brown eyes children, blue eyes were not allowed to go to the same playground with brown eyes, blue eyes group must seat behind the brown eyes, and other. The children with blue eyes were also publicly humiliated and discriminated by the teacher and as a result by the classmates. After a few days, the groups changed their roles.
The game seems to be cruel taking into account that these were third grades children. The privileged group was quickly accepting the rules, and some of them started to express violence against other pupils depending on the color of their eyes. It also affected a study. The discriminated group showed worth results in tests than before the experiment. After the end of the test, the teacher discussed feelings her pupils experienced in both roles, made them compare it and explain. The game changed their minds.
After many years Jane Elliott gathered her adult third-grade pupils and discussed their lives. The meeting was warm and sensitive. It appeared that all of them were deeply concerned about anti-racism programs and had a strong believe that people must not be discriminated by the color of their eyes or skin. This simple game established new generation which taught their children about equality. In fact, the experiment was widely spread and repeated in many schools all over the USA and even in prisons. The results were effective and prominent.
In the modern world, we hopefully don’t have problems with racial discrimination. There are hundreds of official and non-official programs which promote knowledge and acknowledgment of the equality importance inside every society. All the programs are supported by legislative bodies. Anti-racist principles are precisely explained in every school and repeated within certain time periods in different forms. The modern world doesn’t need any radical actions anymore to prevent violence based on lack of education. We learned how to deal with it. The next step is to keep this knowledge and spread it to the next generations.
Author Bio
Helen Birk is a social worker at Chicago, who studied modern problems of society. Today she studies anti-racist programs, organizes support to non-formal education for developing countries and helps students at https://customwriting.com/write-my-essay. Most programs are held in small groups of people. She believes that education is the only way to prevent society from national violence and previous mistakes made by humanity