Teaching "White Privilege" Is Destructive and Divisive

Ask a Scholar: Is “White Privilege” a Good Way to Teach about Race?

By Carol Iannone

Dear Ask a Scholar,

Students at our daughter's school were invited to the White Privilege Conference. I would argue that this is a very divisive approach to teaching diversity in American Culture; it teaches victimization. Isn't there a better method to teach race and gender dynamics than this loaded gun?

Answered by Dr. Carol Iannone, independent scholar and editor-at-large of the NAS's journal Academic Questions. Dr. Iannone received her Ph.D. in English literature from SUNY, Stony Brook, and has written widely on cultural and intellectual issues. She has served on the faculty of the Gallitan School of New York University and was the 2009 recipient of the National Association of Scholars’ Barry R. Gross Memorial Award.

The White Privilege Conference has been held annually for twelve years, and is sponsored by a consortium of institutions of philanthropy and higher education in the Minneapolis area. This year's conference was held at the Sheraton Bloomington in Minneapolis from April 13-16.

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Academics with Far Too Much Time on Their Hands

As Technology Evolves, New Forms of Online Racism Emerge

New forms of online racism are emerging as video games add audio-chat features, and as popular online games draw a more global audience.

 

That was the message of a panel of academics and journalists at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, an annual event that brings together video-game designers, social-media leaders, and cultural critics looking for the latest technology trends.

 

A famous New Yorker cartoon has long summed up the anonymizing power of cyberspace: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But in some popular video games and in social virtual worlds like Second Life, chat features have been added in the past few years, essentially proving the cartoon outdated. The addition of human voices has led people to make assumptions about the players based on their speech, often on the basis of race. That’s according to research cited at the conference by Lisa Nakamura, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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The Authoritarian Roots of Corporate [and Educational Institution] Diversity Training

Find a PDF copy of "The Authoritarian Roots of Corporate Diversity Training" here or here. It's an excellent and enlightening read. Carl Horowitz, the author, introduces readers to the origins of a human experiment exercise widely used in "diversity training sessions."
The pull-quotes are superb reading, even if you can't take time to read the whole document. Save the PDF for future use and reference.

Diversity training, even when imposed with a smiling face, tends to resemble a sadistic elementary-school group exercise. There’s a good reason for this: That’s exactly how it began nearly 40 years ago and operated until the Eighties, when the pillars of corporate governance began to be convinced of its necessity. More than anyone else, we have a retired rural Midwest school teacher, Jane Elliott, to thank for this state of affairs.

Here are a few pull-quotes.

Do CEOs really believe the diversity claptrap or do they put on a happy face to avoid legal and other problems? Either way, they are acting in a manner contrary to the best interests of their companies, shareholders and the public at large.

Jane Elliott herself, ironically, knows her training methods carry an ugly power. She once told an interviewer, “It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were.”

Elliott’s exercises originally began, literally, as child abuse. They have evolved to reducing adults to the level of abused children—fearful, whimpering and apologetic for nonexistent offenses.

Anyone who still has one's critical faculties, after having endured the berating and belittling accusations of racism by diversiphiles in "diversity training" sessions who simply presume guilt of racism by all who bear light skin coloration, surely will resonate with this assessment of "diversity training" that employs the methods of Jane Elliott. "Who is Jane Elliott?" you may ask. Well, I asked the same question. Jane Elliott was an elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa in the 1960s. Perhaps more influential than anyone else, she adapted what was then called "sensitivity training" into "diversity training," which has become a cash cow for herself and for other diversiphiles. Jane Elliott is the one who concocted what has come to be known as the "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise." In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Elliott divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and then proceeded to demean the one group and praise the other with such assertions as,

Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. Oh yes they are! Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. Is your dad brown-eyed? One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you. Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son? . . . This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. . . . The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess while the brown-eyed people have to stay in. The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain. You have to use the paper cups. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed people today will wear collars so that we call tell from a distance what color your eyes are. . . .  You begin to notice today that we have spent a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people. . . . Who goes first for lunch today? Blue-eyed people. No brown-eyed people go back for seconds. Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds. Brown-eyed people do not.

The following day, Elliott reversed the roles of the children in her human experiment.

Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people. That wasn't true. I lied to you yesterday. The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blued-eyed people. . . . The brown-eyed people get an extra five minutes of recess. You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time. You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people. They're smarter than blue-eyed people. And if you don't believe it, look at Brian. Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad! Very, very sad! . . . Brown-eyed people learn fast. Boy, do brown-eyed people learn fast! . . . Blue-eyed people are wasteful.

Watch the video below. Elliott's human experiment incited hostilities between children, including a fight on the playground during recess.

Except for the fact that what Elliott launched on that day in 1968 has become mainstream practice in America's schools and corporations, today, such hostile and divisive human experimentation would be condemned as "child abuse." As shown within a larger quote, Elliott, herself, admits, "I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily." But alas! Instead of averting the potential damage, Jane Elliott has mainstreamed her human experiment exercise. For this she is highly praised by all who have been duped to embrace her human experimentation that actually authorizes and exploits insulting, demeaning, degrading, disgusting, and divisive behavior purposefully to incite hostilities in order to effectuate the experiment. Watch the video provided below and see abuse of individuals in action, abuse of both children and adults.

This exercise entails far more than role-playing. What goes on in these human experimentation sessions is not confined to these sessions. Group identity political power emerges from these sessions, for, despite protests to the contrary, these human experimentations sessions embolden many individuals who find their identity with alleged oppressed groups, now protected classes, carry their voiced grievances out of the sessions to inflict them regularly against anyone who dares to object to the immoral nature of the experiment or points out its counterproductive effects. Individuals who register any objection against the methods and divisive consequences of "diversity training" sessions quickly discover that the human experiment session never ends precisely because it is far more than an experiment or exercise. It is a "brainwashing session," a "re-education session." The animus exhibited against objectors during these sessions persists interminably, or at least until the objector finally succumbs to re-education, sometimes even costing individuals their employment.

Where division, hostility, and racial animosity did not formerly exist, whenever any variety of the "blue-eyed/brown-eyed"  human experiment is imposed, following such sessions, real divisions, hostilities, and racial animosities now exist. Diversiphiles incite hostilities against anyone who dares to disagree not only with their imposed experiments but also with the imposition of their ideology and practices that biases their thinking so that they impose an experiment that breeds the very divisions they allegedly intend to avert. That they do not recognize the unintended consequences renders them diversiphiles.

Reasonable people surely ought to recognize the damage, destruction, and grave injury Elliott's human experimentation has upon human relations in general and upon inter-racial human relations in particular. Elliott herself admits that on that day in 1968, "I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in the space of fifteen minutes."

Carl Horowitz rightly concludes,

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of totalitarianism in all contexts—warfare against happy, confident people in the hopes of transforming them into timid “almost-people.” The question therefore should arise: If Elliott is fully aware of such consequences, why has she continuously pursued them for nearly four decades? And why have corporations, supposedly repositories of money and power, meekly acceded to her demands and those of her proxy allies? Diversity enthusiasts, despite their occasional feints toward reasonableness, are fanatic in their goal of rooting out racial bias. In that, they have learned well the lessons of their original mentor.

Near the close of the video Elliott admits,

I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime. No, I don't want to see it used more widely. I want to see the necessity for it wiped out. And I think that if educators were determined, that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise. But I want to see something used. I'd like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not with all students, unless, unless it's done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way. I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily. And I would never suggest that everybody should use it.

If any college professor were to accost verbally college students the way Jane Elliott verbally accosts her third-grade students, as seen repeatedly in the video below, such a professor ought to be fired promptly.

The following includes actual video of Elliott's human experiment imposed on her third-grade class the third time around.

Booker T. Washington. How Contemporary Is This?

Intellectuals and political hustlers who blame the plight of so many blacks on poverty, discrimination and the "legacy of slavery" are complicit in the socioeconomic and moral decay. But as Booker T. Washington suggested,

"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."

"Racism or Stupidity," by Walter Williams.

For the original quote, see Washington, The Autobiographical Writings, Vol. 1, p. 430.

Washington explains,

"I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public" (pp. 430-431).

So, was Booker T. Washington ahead of his times? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that he had the necessary insight and foresight to recognize and to address a fundamental issue of his own time that would sustain racial oppression of his own people, oppression not from the old oppressors but from the new oppressors, those of his own people who wanted to exploit racialism for political purposes, and has in fact become a major, perhaps the major, source of racial oppression today, the race-baiters, the race-exploiters, the diversifiles, the multiculturalists, the racial do-gooders. No, in the sense that what seems to have been a minority group of his own people who exploited racialism for political purposes was already promoting in those days what has mushroomed into an overwhelming majority and a highly lucrative vocation, given the ascendancy of political correctness, flying under the banner of "multiculturalism and diversity," which has emboldened the racialists to exploit race for political and social purposes by persistently fomenting enmity by conjuring up grievances.