Simulating Ableism towards Neurotypicals?

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So there was this woman called Jane Elliot who wanted to teach her class about racism. She separates blue eyed people from brown eyed people and teaches the brown eyed kids to discriminate against the blue eyed kids. This way, people learn to empathize with the hardships of those who experience racism (or at least that is what it is supposed to do).

Apparently people have suggested that this technique should be used to fight against other forms of discrimination as well. However as someone who has experienced discrimination, I don't think this method of "empathy training" is really a good idea. Others can disagree and that's fine, but from my experience being discriminative towards others in retaliation to discrimination just fosters even more discrimination. People have egos they want to protect and if you give them reason to feel like a victim (especially by victimizing them) they will never take your cause seriously. And remember that a lot of people who do discriminate towards minority groups already have a victim mentality, e.g, white supremacists belief that whites are going extinct. It's ludicrous, but that's genuinely what they think. I just don't think it's very productive to do something like that. perhaps some people learn from the experience and that's awesome, but I'm just not so sure.

What do you guys think?

And if you experience racism (or any other form of prejudice), that commentary will also be useful.

I always thought of it as an interesting social experiment, but not a way to combat racism.

The best way to combat discrimination is to encourage diversity. I've always found it to be the case in everything from racism, to homophobia, to sexism. It probably works the same way for ableism as well.

It's interesting. It shows that if a group is in a position of power over another group, they feel entitled to loads of privileges over others. Allowing them to experience it for a while can help them see just how messed up it is to be in that system and suffer from it. Also, being one of the brown eyed elite can show a person how much power you can have over someone and why that is dangerous. The brown eyed children in the experiment ended up bullying their peers because the teacher gave them license to do so. Certain societal constructs permit people to act really inhumane towards others and it's wrong. It's also a danger of herd mentality, IMO.

But, like you said, it's no solution to discrimination. I think people experiencing that would cling onto their ego and end up becoming even worse in their discrimination of others. I think getting people to meet others who part of these groups and identify with them as equals is a huge step in the right direction.

interesting thread. This isnt directly related, but a couple of months ago i attended a national autistic society training course for volunteers. For the benefit of NT participants, they created a kind of 'autism simulation' to simulate sensory overload. They were asked to write down a list of words and inbetween the person giving the training would flash the light on and off and make noises to serve as a distraction. While its probably harder to make the point of discrimination, its possible to simulate autism co-morbids to a degree.

Jane Elliot did this with adults, not children. If you ever get to watch the video recording of this (entitled "Blue Eyed"), I highly recommend it. It is something quite remarkable.

Research exits that once a minority becomes a majority, they will turn around and marginalize the new minority. I did some really fun research assistant work related to this in my undergrad program. Sadly, it appears to be human nature to marginalize those who belong to "them" instead of us.

I know there was at least one school teacher that did indeed do this with children. I remember watching a documentary about it in English class.

Actually, school teachers were among the group that Jane Elliot used. I imagine the experiment has been recreated repeatedly. I am still trying to find a way to sneak it into the training that I do in a new way. It is really quite powerful. I think it is especially salient because it seems so blatantly unfair to treat someone differently because they have blue eyes. Then at some point people have the "Oh...Yeah." moment when they realize it is blatantly unfair to treat anyone differently because of membership in a minority.

Unfortunately, I don't think this will work. People without disabilities can (usually) walk away from the continual discrimination that comes from having a disability. Disabled people can't.

I guess it might work as a way of helping people understand what discrimination is, but once they understand, I don't think it'll really do much to help them fight their own biased attitudes.

The best way to do that is probably to give them lots of information about what people with disabilities (or of different races, etc.) are like. The reason people are so prone to prejudice is that we are used to being afraid of the foreign, the things we don't understand. It's all down to instinct, the way you have to protect yourself and your family from outsiders who may want to raid or kill or kidnap people in your group. We lived in small groups for ever so much longer than we had a global society. It used to be impossible to cooperate in anything bigger than those small groups, so we never really learned any instinct that taught us to empathize with those we weren't familiar with. In modern times, when we can benefit from cooperation world-wide, that totally unreasoning fear/hatred of the unfamiliar is still getting in the way.

The most sensible approach seems to be to work within our own evolutionary heritage, to acknowledge that we do find the unfamiliar frightening and tend to want to "defend" ourselves against the imagined threat. If that is the case, then the solution is to make those unfamiliar things familiar. To combat your prejudice against some group, learn about them and meet lots of individuals from that group. Find the similarities between your life and theirs, and familiarize yourself with the differences so that they are no longer intimidating.

This is one of the reasons why integration in schools is so important. If you grow up familiar with people who aren't like yourself, then it's just like growing up with left-handed people, who hold their pens differently and use left-handed scissors and sometimes accidentally elbow you at the lunch table, but are people first and foremost and perhaps among your friends. Meet enough left-handed people and which hand they write with becomes quite unimportant compared to the rest of that person's personality.

I think a frank talk with a person who had the disability in question would do more to help than any number of simulations, and working alongside someone with that disability would be the best of all.

I get the feeling this would only temporarily change a persons perspective. They might think about it the rest of the day, it might change their actions for a few days after that, but I don't believe it could have any true long term effects. Once the experiment is over with it depends wholly on the individual to want to adopt this new attitude, and call me pessimistic but I don't think that many people have sufficient desire for self improvement to change something that doesn't directly harm them.

If you ask me, I think the best way to fight discrimination is with spending time with one another. Once you get rid of the external things that make us different, skin color, religious clothing etc, you can focus on the vast majority of things that make us the same. Something as simple as sharing a love of a particular sport can be enough to make people start to see the common ground rather than the differences.

NOTHING, IMO, will ever substitute racism for what it is. It's a vile disease that needs to be eradicated off the face of the earth.

All this experiment does is teach kids what it 'might' look like, but without the intense emotional part of it, they are effectively doing nothing but introducing it to kids at a younger age. No one will ever truly understand until they have gone through that experience themselves, Like having Aspergers (even though it's not a race, but the experience in very similar) for example and sometimes you get hit with the double whammy. It sickens me.

This here. I think this technique only serves as an exercise, but it won't solve the problem (or rather, the problems).

Actually, InThisTogether, she started off this experiment on her class. Then she progressed to adults. Not exactly sure if that technique is all that useful for adults, but at least they are mature enough to think critically about what is happening to them and help them to realize (even if only temporarily) what someone in a minority group experiences constantly.

Yes, "fear of the foreign" is an important aspect to discrimination, but a lack of information about the "foreign" is not an excuse to be delibrately discrimanatory.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Yes. Once you are aware of your lack of information and perhaps of your tendency to avoid those of a particular minority, you have the responsibility to inform yourself.

Ableism, and really any other form of discrimination, are detestable.

I disagree with the teaching of Jane Elliot, to use a class to attempt to teach them about Racism , or any other form of discrimination, into the child mind, is to actually teach them such discrimination. How are you garunteed they wont walk away from the experience, actually becoming affected by it?

You cant.

Racism, Ableism, and really any form of discrimination shouldnt be taught. That process only serves the discrimination to continue.