HOW RACIST ARE YOU???? ~~~~ CH 4 NOW

[RTKangaMummy]

NOW

always, i think mumble was talking about herself.

Knowldege doesn;t come with age though does it, but with experience. My point was where is one supposed to get experience of that.

I'll be blunt:

You are presuming she's racist becasue she didn;t know something about that race. She said the skin underneath was pink, this is not a derogitory comment. I;m positive she didnlt voice this thought at the time in case it was offensive. I went out with a lad from Bangladesh once.... he said [I;m heavily censoring] that he thought all 'british girls [presume he meant of white skin] had blond hair down there' He also thought other things in terms of race, colour and private parts which weren't true becasue he'd never seen them.

He was also a bit of a twit but I didn;t presume all bangladesh lads and lassess [se how I use lasses allt he time, was kind of biggot am I?] were twits. That would have been the racist bit, not the body curiosity.

blonde woman is hideous-she OOZES daily mail reader- dp and i reckon she went on this to sort out all the silly political correctness gone mad nonsense she's read about...
scary that she influences young minds though eh?

Oh dear. watching this on +1. I hope the penny dropped for that teacher woman when she watched it back.

Oh no - the blonde woman's attitude/beliefs are a lot more dangerous than that. She genuinely thinks she understands racism, seems to be in some kind of bubble where she has convinced herself she is sooo liberal and 'with it' when it comes to race that there is no need at all for her to change.

i dont understand how she thought her husband changing into a suit was the same as this man being the only mixed race parent collecting a child at school.

does she not understand that he cant change his skin. its not the same at all.

I was shocked by the blonde teacher woman! wanted to slap her when she started conparing being black to having to wear a suit, and she was shocked to discover black girl who was stunning beutiful, why the hell wouldnt she be, had pik skin underneath!! She's going to get some real stick for those comments after half term!

I didnt like the methods used but guess if it made others think then helpful. I know racism still happens loads, see it often at work in the community, from older generations and from police I remember once my ex boss told me off for letting a black man into the building as she was trying to check as he "looked undestriable", but i knew he was there for a meeting, because i kknew him. I got dragged inot the office and yelled at!!

Ok, I made myself watch that all the way through. I have a lot of thoughts about it but this is my major one...

Of all the people sat in that room the people who got to the end and understood what was trying to be achieved were the ones who already understood racism on a real level. The ones who got to the end and didn't were the ones came into the room having no understanding of racism on a real level.

Therefore nothing was achieved within that group. Perhaps something was achieved by televising it but within that group (of the ones who spoke) they all went out as they came in either knowing racism is a problem or knowing it is not.

i know that back skin in pink undermeath, but that could be from cleaning many many cut knees and elbows

thats what i thought noname although you put it better than i could

i agree, i doubt very many of the blue eyed group learnt much as they truely believed that they understood racism, that it isnt a huge issue in the UK and that they werent racist.

Have I missed the point here? As a black person watching this programme I feel quite embarassed that none of the non-white people stood up for the blue eyed group. I think that the organiser of the experiment should have pointed that out to them. To me what stood out was that:

1. If the tables were turned, all these so-called "discriminated against" minorities would treat white people extremely badly and that is so disgusting because they didn't seemed to be justifying their behaviour as teaching white people what it means to be non-white".

2. I learned how guilty/angry some white people must feel about characters like Nick Griffin or Hitler who do not represent their views but get lumped into the same racial category.

I felt very embarassed about how the non-white people in the brown eyed group behaved.

Sorry, a bit of a rant but i think I'm more disturbed by how easy it was to convince a group who claim to have been discriminated against to discriminate against other people despite knowing how it made them feel.

benjysmum, im not sure i quite understand your post but it's late so maybe its just me.

do you think that the brown eyed group should have defended the blue eyed group because of what they have all presumably experienced?

i think the brown eyed group saw it more as an oportunity to explain how it felt to be discriminated against.

TBH lisad, I think that does display the power of the experiment somewhat... there was nothing to say that all the people in the blue group did not understand or that all the people in the brown group did understand. The people who were shown speaking did fit that stereotype (for want of a better word) but you have jumped from what you were shown to the assumption that all the people in the blue group had the same attitude when, actually, we have little idea that they did.

I am not meaning to pick on you so please don't take it personally but I think it is an example of how racism (amoungst other things) pervades society so easily, it is because we, as human beings, extrapolate. We take one piece of evidence and apply it across groups. It is because of this that we have this problem in the first place to a certain extent.

benjysmum, I do agree, I think it was too easy to turn people into the persecuter simply by giving them the impression that it was ok to do it - just like white people have been told in very subtle ways it is ok to persecute non-whites (regardless of the loud public message the subtle undertones still very much exist). I also think that was what the blonde lady was trying to get at - in a very ham fisted and inelequent way, that persecution is wrong Full Stop regardless of who you are doing it to or why you are doing it and that was what her problem was, she did not want to persecute the blue gruoup because she did not want to persecute anyone, she was uncomforable with what they were being asked to do.

It's not you, it's me Boo. You understood me perfectly. I expected at least one non-white person to stand up for the blue eyed group (I like to think I would have if I'd been there) and I'm so embarassed they didn't.

I just had this feeling of "now you know how it feels, serves you right" coming off some the brown eyed group.

i have to say the only person in the brown eyed group that gave me that impression was the young guy with the swirls shaved into his hair.

i thought both the black lady and the man with the dreads made their points very well. i just dont think that they were listened to by the blue eyed group. actually, thats wrong, i dont think they were listened to by the white blonde lady, the show didnt actually show much response from the other blue eyed people so i dont know whether they understood the point or not.

I, on the other hand, found the black lady very confrontational. Perhaps it's me and I was misinterpreting her body language but she seemed to be actively enjoying the fact that she had access to a buffet lunch while the blue-eyed people had to make do with dodgy sarnies.

She also seemed to feel that if anyone didn't agree with her, it must be because they weren't "hearing" her. Surely people have the right to disagree with each other.

The other chap appeared to have his own insecurities. He gave the reason for not picking his daughter up from school to be that "he perceived" that she would be discriminated against. He offered no evidence that this had ever been the case. I got the impression that he had decided several things about the other parents at his child's school (which in my view is discrimination) and then decided it meant they were being discrimonatory against him.

Sorry but this programme was shit.

The lady in her hey day was inspirational, to do an experiment like that in 60s America was bloody brave and she will also have kudos from me for that.

I did this experiment when I was at school about 8 or 9 I think and it had a huge effect on me and was a massive success.

However, this was a failure. To do this experiment on a group of adults in a truely multi cultural society was never going to work.

Firstly, everyone knew what was happening, and what to expect. They reacted because of that not because they were being discriminated against.

Secondly, she kept making the assumption that just because you are white you have no idea what racism feels like, or that it actually goes on. So how would she have dealt with me a white green eyed lady who has a black partner and 3 beautiful mixed race children. I understand, identify and realise that racism happens.I would have stood up and told her the experiment was floored, I can only presume that I would have been told I was an ignorant white person in denial.

In it's day this was ground breaking social experiment. In modern day Britain it was a total failure, and I speak as someone who believes that racism is alive and well. just not in the cut and dried black v white stereotype.

boooooooooooooooo I think the woman in her 60s learned a lot... she said right at the end that she knows she struggles with prejudices

I thought the whole experiment was flawed, maeningless shit.

Divide a group of people into two groups on some arbitrary factor. Give one group lots of power, treat the other group like crap - in other words, encourage one group to bully the other. And this tells us about racism... how?

Possibly this "experiment" might have had some validity in segregated America. But when was the last time anyone saw a sign anywhere in the UK saying "Non-whites need not apply" (or similar)?

One of the things I took away from this program was the worrying number of non-white people who looked as if they were quite looking forward to the chance to indulge in a bit of white-bashing. On the other hand, the Stanford Prison experiment demonstrated that the majority of people, given a position of power over another helpless group, will tend to abuse that power - and that the helpless group will accept this situation. So maybe the whole race thing was irrelvent anyway, and some people just wanted a legitimate excuse to indulge in some sort of power trip.

And just to clarify - I'm not saying that there isn't any racism, or that non of the participants perhaps harboured racist feelings. I'm saying that I thought the so-called experiment was rubbish.

"Divide a group of people into two groups on some arbitrary factor. Give one group lots of power, treat the other group like crap - in other words, encourage one group to bully the other. And this tells us about racism... how? "

I actually thought it was a good idea but badly executed. She shouldn't have let Race become so prominent so quickly during the experiemnt IMO but should have made the eye colour the focus of it. Perhaps it was just the way it was edited or something but it would have been so much better if they could have taken colour of skin out of it for as long as possible and really emphasised that this was all about eye colour. Maybe they could have found some blue eyed people who weren't white and had more white people with brown eyes in the brown eyed group but I guess it just ended up the way it did because those are the people they got.

Anyway - I understand what the experiemnt was trying to prove and I think it did show that most white people, while they can empathise, will never really understand what it is like to be in a minority and to be treated differently becaue of something you can't change.

Don't know, I've been thinking about this and I think I agree with those who say it was prob. inappropriate for 2009 Britain as opposed to 60's america. It was all a bit too obvious - one of the htings about racism is that often it's just so much more subtle than this and so much harder to pin down. This was so sledgehammer that I wondered how useful it could be.

Was v. sad about bloke who wouldn't collect his DD from school. We have lots of ghastly white people with tattoos, fags and cans of stella artois turning up at our school gates who swear a lot and explicity disobey requests from the school about things like not bringing their dogs in, not smoking around the school gates, not approaching children who have had arguments with their little darlings etc. and I would hope that someone who looks like him would be infinitely more welcome. V. sad that his experiences have obviously left him with a different expectation.

just watched it. crap.

60s america is v differentto now uk, and her work hasn't evolved to reflect that.

wanted to thump the teacher. loved that she made a point of saying the girl who fell was pretty, you could almost hear her mentally finishing with "for a black kid".

random point... young, blond blue eye guy (? s african accent) was on a consumer rights prog in the week as a supposedly "random customer". methinks he wants to be an actor...

Phew!
My opinions have been put across above much braver and eloquantly than I could manage last night.