Prejudice

He was about 6 2''. Braided Hair, a golden tooth and gansta clothes could not hide the fact that he was a teenager - he had more than his share of pimples for one. His pants started a few inches lower than they should have. Yet another teenager desperately trying to be seen 'cool'.



'Sir, can I have use your phone for a call please?'



I pretended not to hear. Peeked into my watch - close to twelve. Fck, I should not be out here this time.



He, I and an oriental girl sitting two rows away were the only people in the bus station ,somewhere in the american heartland.



'Excuse me, Sir.'



Louder this time. Now the girl also looked up. First at him and then at me.



Is he on drugs? Does he have a gun? What all can I afford to lose if I am going to get mugged? More than a few questions flashed through my mind.



'Sir, I need to call my girlfriend to come and pick me up. The public phones ain't workin'. Would appreciate if I could make a very quick call to this number'



He shoved a piece of paper to my face.



No longer able to pretend dead, I now had to look at him.



He was a kid. A reed thin kid. C'mon you loser, you are afraid of this kid? But fck, what if he had a gun?



The girl was now openly staring at him, hands tightly clutching her pink handbag. She was a typical, tiny, far eastern female who would get blown away by a strong wind. She reminded me of Ziyi Zhang in Memoirs of a Geisha, though she was not as pretty. So let us call her Ziyi from now on.



I could not say I am not carrying a phone as I had used it in public view about five minutes ago.



'Okay.'



I got my phone out, dialled the number and handed it out to him.



'Hey hon, its me. Can you come and pick me up?'

....

'Thanks... am waiting. Love ya.'



'Thank you sir'. He handed the phone back to me.



About fifteen minutes later, a young black girl with very tight fitting clothes and with shoes of such high heels, it seemed she was standing on a platform, sashayed in to where we were sitting.



After a very public display of affection which made me look down and Ziyi to turn a shade of red (both of us were from prissy asian cultures after all) they gathered his stuff and started to walk away, still lost in each others eyes.



Then he stopped and looked back at the two of us and gave a radiant smile (or was he laughing at the paki and the chinkie? ) and waved at us, as if saying goodbye.



Ziyi and me looked at each other. She had a wry smile. Both of us knew exactly what the other was thinking.



All that night I could not stop thinking - how much the presence, absence or excess of melanin in our skin affects our lives. Perhaps now I could really look into one of the worst ideas in human history with new eyes.



Okay. So much for real life.



This is an extract from a really cool book I just finished. 'Made to Stick' by Dan and Chip Heath who write a really cool column in fastcompany. The book is about how to make stickier ideas.



One of the characteristics of a sticky idea, they say, is Concreteness.



Here is how a second grade teacher made sure her tiny tots would never grow up without an ability to empathize.



Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes.



Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The next day, Jane Elliott, an elementary school teacher in Iowa, found herself trying to explain his death to her classroom of third graders. In the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, students were familiar with King but could not understand who would want him dead, or why.



Elliott said, "I knew it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, because we'd talked about discrimination since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, one of our 'Heroes of the Month' two months earlier, couldn't be explained to little third-graders in Riceville, Iowa."



She came to class the next day with a plan: She aimed to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of the class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids. She then made a shocking announcement: Brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids - "They're the better people in this room." The groups were separated: Blue-eyed kids were forced to sit at the back of the classroom. Brown-eyed kids were told that they were smarter. They were given extra time at recess. The blue-eyed kids had to wear special collars, so that everyone would know their eye color from a distance. The two groups were not allowed to mix at recess.



Elliott was shocked at how quickly the class was transformed. "I watched those kids turn into nasty,vicious, discriminating third-graders .... it was ghastly," she said. "Friendship seemed to dissolve instantly, as brown eyed kids taunted their blue-eyed former friends. One brown-eyed student asked Elliott how she could be the teacher "if you've got dem blue eyes."



At the start of class the following day, Elliott walked in and announced that she had been wrong. It was actually the brown-eyed children who were inferior. This reversal of fortune was embraced instantly. A shout of glee went up from the blue-eyed kids as they ran to place their collars on their lesser, brown-eyed counterparts.



On the day when they were in the inferior group, students described themselves as sad, bad, stupid nd mean. "When we were down," one boy said, his voice cracking, "it felt like everything bad was happening to us." When they were on top, the students felt happy, good, and smart.



Even their performance on academic tasks changed. One of the reading exercises was a phonics card pack that the kids were supposed to go through as quickly as possible. The first day, when the blue-eyed kids were on the bottom, it took them 5.5 minutes. On the second day, when they were on top, it took them 2.5 minutes. "Why couldn't you go this fast yesterday?" Elliott asked. One blue-eyed girl said, "We had those collars on ..." Another chimed in, "We couln't stop thinking about those collars."



Elliott's simulation made prejudice concrete - brutally concrete. It also had an enduring impact on the students' lives. Studies conducted ten and twenty years later showed that Elliott's students were significantly less prejudiced than their peers who had not been through the exercise.



Students still remember the simulation vividly. A fifteen year re-union of Elliott's students broadcast on the PBS series Frontline revealed how deeply it had moved them. Ray Hansen, remembering the way his understanding changed from one day to the next, said, "It was one of the most profound learning experiences I've ever had." Sue Ginder Rolland said, "Prejudice has to be worked out young or it will be with you all your life. Sometimes I catch myself [discriminating], stop myself, think back to the third grade, and remember what it was like to be put down.



Jane Elliott put hooks into the idea of prejudice. It would have been easy for her to treat the idea of prejudice the way other classroom ideas are treated - as an important but abstract bit of knowledge, like the capital of Kansas or the definiton of "truth." She could have treated prejudice as something to be learned, like the story of a World War II battle. Instead Ellott turned prejudice into an experience. Think of the "hooks" involved: The sight of a friend suddenly sneering at you. The feel of a collar around your neck. The despair at feeling inferior. The shock you get when you look at your own eyes in the mirror. This experience put so many hooks into the students memories that, decades later, it could not be forgotten. .....



Image courtesy - Phinaphantasy