Have You Felt the Pain of Racism?

Tortured Souls

“It is nearly impossible for whites to understand what African Americans experience daily all over America. Whites know little or nothing about the slights blacks encounter when they walk into a restaurant, shopping mall or even library. Few whites ever know what it does to a person inside when you cross a street and hear the inevitable sound of electric automobile door locks snapping shut. There's no way whites can know what it's like for one's children to be judged solely by their skin color.” (Taken from "Exaggerated fear of blacks at root of Cincinnati unrest", by Claude Lewis.)

Watch this movie.

"Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" Experiment

But as an African-American Metro columnist at this newspaper, I feel I labor under a sense of obligation. Shackled to this privilege is a duty to attempt to explain to white readers what they don't realize about being black, in the interest of shared understanding.

I would wager that much of black people's frustration with white people -- indeed, the fist-clenching frustration in any relationship -- stems from not being understood or having our concerns marginalized.

I'm generalizing here, but often we bemoan "driving while black," and white people say we must have been doing something wrong, otherwise the police wouldn't have been following us.

We say we were followed in a store by a white salesperson; white people say we're hypersensitive. We point out how few black executives are in the front offices and white colleagues say there weren't any qualified black candidates.

To my white readers who "get it," or at least concede that maybe there's something to get, this is not for you.

This is for the thousands of white readers who have written and called me over the last four years, and the people who pollute the paper's Web site, all insisting that racism today is a figment of black people's imaginations. Let me tell you a short story.

When I was 8 or so, I was uninvited to a white Sunday school classmate's birthday party. Her parents told mine it was because a relative didn't like black people.

Until I left Memphis for college, I saw this white family at church every Sunday; sometimes her parents were leading the praise and worship service.

To this day, every time I see this girl, now married with children of her own, I am reminded that I could not celebrate her birthday with her because I am black.

If you are white and that evokes an emotion, what do you feel? Anger that a child could be treated so harshly?

Or anger because I brought up the past and just the other day, the black employees at Burger King were rude to you. And you have to deal with discrimination too, this being a majority-black town?

The latter response, educator Jane Elliott told me Thursday, is a sad reflection of the refusal of some white people to believe black people's reality.

"When a person of color tells me what happened to them, I say, 'Tell me more, because I need to know more because they (white people) will believe me when I say it.'" Her words will carry authority, Elliott says, simply because she is white.

Many of the black folks reading this are nodding, recalling all the times they had to get someone white to co-sign with their perspective before other white people would take them seriously.

The truth: It is nearly impossible, even for the most anti-racist white people, to truly understand how a lifetime of discrimination digs into your soul, how the disrespectful denials of your truth can make you insane.

I don't want sympathy, just the respect that I know my reality more than you ever could. More than anyone else I've seen, Elliott makes this clear.

She's the creator of the legendary "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" experiment. She tried it first on her third-grade classroom in the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, on April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Dividing her class by the color of their eyes was her attempt to show her students what it feels like to be assigned to the underclass.

The third time she segregated her class by eye color was in 1970 and the lesson was videotaped.

On the first day, she told the blue-eyed students that they were better, smarter, would get more time on the playground and could get seconds at lunch. The brown-eyed students had to drink from a cup, not the water fountain, and would endure unwarranted criticism of their behavior.

Almost instantly, the brown-eyed children began to wither. Their second-class citizenship, just hours old, had begun to affect their performance in class. And the blue-eyed students reveled in their privileged status. "I felt like I was a king," one of the blue-eyed boys said, "like I ruled them brown-eyes. Like I was better than them. Happy."

Contrast that with the despair of a brown-eyed student: "The way they treated you, it felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything."

The next day, Elliott told her students she'd been mistaken, that brown-eyed students were better, smarter. And the students who had been discriminated against the day before adopted the attitudes of the oppressor. When they were the lower class, the brown-eyed children struggled for more than five minutes to get through a flash-card exercise; when they were on top, they whizzed through the cards in under three minutes. "The only thing that had changed was that now, they were superior people," Elliott said on the tape.

She'd created a little America in her classroom, one in which the discrimination experienced by people of color could not be denied, not even by third-graders.

That transformative aha moment happens for almost all of the adults who have participated in the "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" exercise Elliott has conducted around the world in the decades since.

How resistant are some white people to her message? Very. She's had a knife pulled on her, one white man hit her and others have threatened her life.

But at 73, she's not afraid. She's too busy to be frightened, not when so many have yet to walk a mile in another man's moccasins.

Contact Wendi C. Thomas at (901) 529-5896 or e-mail thomasw@commercialappeal.com.

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