race+and+class

Racism and Class are both very intertwined topics commonly associated with discrimination.

In the "[|blue eyes brown eyes]" experiment, teacher Jane Elliott came up with an interesting experiment to teach her students about racism and prejudice. The experiment occured on the day of April 5, 1968, also known as the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. In the experiment, Mrs. Elliott made her class divide into two groups based upon eye color, blue or brown. She told the blue eyed group that they were superior to the brown eyed group, and within a couple of minutes they started to harass the brown eyed group, and the brown eyed group started to feel insucure. The next day, she flipped the experiment to where brown eyed people where the superior group, with the same results. This shows how the people with the power tend to be the ones discriminating against the people without the power.

An example of people with power discriminating against people without power, also preventing them from moving up in class, was Pre-Affirmative Action. Employers were discriminating about which people they employed, and declining people based on their race or sex. The policies of Affirmative Action took affect to prevent racial discrimination when employing people of minorities. The policies have gone a little bit too far, and nowadays they sometimes prevent some white males from obtaining such jobs.

Once, while I was at the dentist's, we were talking about becoming a dentist. The Dental Hygeinist told me that it is harder for a white male to become a dentist than it is for a white females or minority females and males, because the Dentistry business in general is trying to increase their diversity. When you think about a dentist, typically a white male comes to mind, and they want to change this. She mentioned that she considered it "reverse discrimination. Upon later thought, I realized that this is not "reverse discrimination", because there is no such thing. Discrimination is still discrimination, even if it is against the majority of the population. This is shown in most schools, where the "popular crowd" makes up about 10% of the population, but defines about 75% of what the school's population does, how they dress, and even how they act. In the Documentary //The Merchants of Cool,// It talks about how popular culture defines selling rates of different items, and everyones rush to go "mainstream". They talk about what it really means to be "cool", and i thought that this is sort of the same thing as race. The people with the money and power define what the people who are looking for the money and power do, and how they act. They cant go up in fame, or class, without first convincing the mainstream producers, like MTV, to start to advertise and promote their product. MTV can pick and choose which groups it wants to make popular, based on their interests.

When I looked up Dentist on google image search, the whole first page of results were white males. I found this interesting.



My mom and I had an interesting conversation about her experiences of racial discrimination and profiling. At the school where she used to work, their was a big push to get a family of african american triplets into the school. They ended up moving people, and even dropping a family to fit them into a class. In an effort to increase their diversity, they had racially discriminated against the white family that was dropped, in order to create space for the african american triplets. Another one of her experiences she remembered from her father. He was the manager of a K-mart store, and his boss told him to "We need more black people in our store." His dad responded with "I'm not getting any applications from black people." His boss told him "You need to go out and find them. I dont care if they cant perform the job, and I dont care if you have to fill out the application for them, but we need more blacks in our store."

Another example of Race and Class being tied together is in Brown vs. Board of Education. Most of the schools that African Americans were allowed to go to were public schools. Going to a public school prevents you from recieving any higher education than the rest of your family, and you never increase in class without a better paying job, which is a result of a higher education. Brown fought for his rights to go to the Private school near him, so that he could recieve a better education, and potentially move up in "class".

AnnBibChapman