In 2006, Kiri Davis documented how things haven’t changed much since Jane Elliot conducted a social experiment in her classroom in 1970.
Jane Elliot
Elliot, a third-grade teacher, segregated her class by eye color. She told the kids with blue eyes that they were better than the brown-eyed children. She even made them wear collars.
The children began to treat each other differently when Elliot told them that the brown-eyed kids were stupid, or lazy, or other negative behaviors that were flat-out lies.
The brown-eyed third graders began to believe that they were inferior, because their classmates were treating them like they were second class.
When Elliot flipped it around and enacted a classroom policy that made the brown-eyed children higher in the social hierarchy, it became even more disturbing.
The kids engaged in violent acts. Self esteem plummeted. Solely because the person in a position of authority told them that was how things were-and they accepted it, internalizing atrocities of inequality. That was 1970.
More than 30 years later, Kiri Davis made this film called A Girl Like Me which astonished me by capturing the present-day psychological repercussions of historic oppression of young women of color. The doll experiment is particularly disturbing. “Which doll is nicer?” Davis asks the girl. Her response makes my eyes water and my stomach churn.
This acceptance of a relationship between a skin color and a behavior trait or ability isn’t confined to African-Americans.
Mexicans, Native Americans, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pacific Islanders, all people whose skin colors aren’t white observe that light skin and straight hair equates to preferential treatment in so many situations in these United States of America. I know I did when I was young. That is another blog post.
I hope that tomorrow at noon things really do begin to change.
The American legal system prides itself on having the ability to give a fair chance to everyone who has been accused of doing something unacceptable to talk it out. A large portion of JDs will want to fight you if you say that people don’t get a fair shot at redeeming themselves in the American courts. This, however, is not the case at the Guantanamo Bay. Earlier as I sipped a fiercely caffeinated brew, my RSS feed sported the headline Judge Opens First Habeus Corpus Hearing on Guantanamo Detainees.
Holy Schnikes! In light of the recent election, has the time come when people start respecting each other? When the gluttonous deciders begin to value the lives of people?
Pfff. Yea right.
I can see it now: Judge Leon dangles the 6th amendment in front of the prisoners and journalists like he was Cesar Millan. Establishing the order his position forces him to depict he addresses the court: “Hey guys. Today’s the day you get to find out why we’re really keeping you here. I know, I know, it’s been years. Where does the time go, right? Today’s the day!”
He had that dream about John Bunyan and the gargantuan faceless paper monster teaming up to smother him in his chambers again last night. Going to have to talk to Johnny Walker about that one. He looks down at his prisoner status report. Leon’s eyes widen and glaze over. Channeling his inner Blanche DuBois, Leon’s neck cocks at an unnatural angle, popping his neck. Scrawled in Gregory G. Katsas’ tight, slanty penmanship the mostly blank sheet of paper reads, “You don’t need to know.”
Leon looks up and barks, “Hold on a second. I’m not going to be able to tell you guys the nature and cause of your accusation. You journalists aren’t supposed to be here. You lawyers aren’t supposed to be speaking with your clients. Nope. Sally must have sent out the wrong memo. Nope. Nope. I still don’t have jurisdiction. Ooh. I have 40 minutes to tee off. Leon out.”
Seriously though, the courts need to cease deflecting jurisdiction and deal with the serious flaws in the legal system that have deprived people of their right to believe whatever gets them through their day.
Every year, me and my Western-cultured friends gather round the sweets in what many of us agree is the most fun holiday of the year. It’s the day you can be anything that you have ever want to be, no matter how twisted. Always fancied yourself someone who renders foreign baby flesh into pocketbooks (*ahem* Dick Cheney)? This is the day when that’s okay.
As long as it’s something you haven’t been already. No one wants to be that lametard with no imagination who wears the same thing they did last year. That goes against the grain of the holiday. Why be something you already were and not progress as an individual?
Furthermore, when a plethora of parties present themselves a quandary surfaces: Do you wear the same costume for days and risk being tagged in multiple photo albums which span days? Or do you buy more than one costume and feed the Spirit store beast that resurrects itself each Halloween to slurp up your savings?
If only life were so simple as my three-year old niece’s. Yesterday, I bought a white sheet and cut it into a ghost costume for her. She ran around the kitchen island elatedly making spooky noises until the hood slipped over her eyes and she ran into a wall.
The beauty of it was that we didn’t need anything complicated to have fun. No slutty accessories as seems to be required of all costumes worn by females. No expensive wigs. Just a plane of imagination and a pair of scissors.
Here comes Dora’s backpack to save the day. Or should I say, Vanessa’s mouse.
I have found four days of costumes. Booyakashah! All you need to mimic the spectacle of power accumulation in America (Palin, Biden, McCain, or Obama) are a printer and a pair of scissors. Might need to mount these on something sturdy so they don’t flop forward into your friend’s face.
Tonight as my pumpkin seeds bake, I will be scribbling vile things on the foreheads of the candidates I don’t like. <cue evil laugh>
As I leave the polling place, the little sticker on my hand makes me proud to have made the effort to have my opinion heard in a country that used to disenfranchise Mexican-American women.
The little American flag appears to wave freely in a patriotic breeze. Printed to the right of the flag, the statement “I Voted” encapsulates and simplifies the struggle to participate in the elections that give people the power to make policies which alter the way they live life. It seems so long ago that my grandmother had to pay a poll tax to vote. She’s 90.
I wonder if hindrances to casting ballots are truly a thing of the past, or if they’ve morphed into sneakier ways of denying people’s rights?
I voted on a Hart Intercivic eslate 3000 this morning. I wonder if it accurately cast my ballot?
After watching the documentary Hacking Demoracy, I’m not so sure. It was alarmingly simple to hack the voting machines. After a negative 16,000 vote count was produced on the Diebold voting machines in Volusia County, Florida in 2000, the movie’s protagonist Bev Harris wanted to find out just WTF had happened. Authorities claimed it was faulty memory cards, but no one was allowed to see how the machines work. Not even the California Secretary of State.
Harris went online and downloaded official software and documents from a Diebold ftp site that had been left unsecured. She began to discover how much of a joke the security features are in the software. To bypass a password prompt, Harris accessed the spreadsheet file from which the software pulled the vote totals and wrote different numbers in the fields. Voila! Someone else had officially won the election.
The company that had been hired to certify the machines as acceptable for use (and sale) had not even tested the security features.
Oh, Democracy and Capitalism. Hand in hand you frolic down the side walk in front of a strip mall. What a playful couple of love struck old farts.
The pivotal scene is the one in which a computer scientist writes a few lines of code and uploads it into the memory card that stores the votes. A room full of election officials gasps in astonishment when the votes they had cast emerged from the machine altered. One even cried as she recognized how corrupt the election system had become.
Unfortunately for me and the Austinites who voted at my polling place, the Hart Intercivic eslate 3000 is a machine manufactured by a private company that intends to profit off of lucrative grants from the US government. I am supposed to trust that this equipment was not tampered with by some political zealot. Riiiight.
These are the same machines that disenfranchised voters in Hawaii and tabulated votes wrong in Virginia. In 2004, some Hart machines had a default setting for a vote for Bush. Even when Austinites selected a straight Democratic ticket, their vote went to Bush.
These machines make a mockery out of something that’s supposed to be sacrosanct. In the end, does my vote really count? Is this sticker merely a conversation starter for me to flaunt a status symbol? Oh look at me and how political I am. I can push important buttons. My vote doesn’t really count. But check out the sweet flag on my sticker.
Or is my sticker a badge of hope? Hope that my vote is tallied correctly. Hope that the next few years in the US find our society living healthier and more sustainable lives in all aspects. Hope that Americans begin to respect each other’s ideas and beliefs and lay off the ethnocentrism. As I wear my sticker, I hope that the memory cards haven’t been tainted.
