February celebrates Black History Month and typically hosts Lunar New Year. As such, we learn about African-American history, which is not covered extensively in the general curriculum, and experience celebrations of the Lunar New Year from different cultural perspectives. February honors diversity and looks past discrimination.
And yet, I’m confused by the rhetoric preached by countless teachers: everyone is equal but different. Should we celebrate diversity, or should we focus on the similarities from human to human?
Discrimination, I believe, is socially constructed and often bad. Jane Elliott conducted a social experiment in her classroom about 50 years ago. Like many of us, Elliott’s students recited rhetoric about the importance of social equality. When Elliott asked her students if they were willing to participate in a social experiment to test social inequality, her students were more than willing to play along.
Elliott based her experiment on eye color. The blue-eyed children of her second grade class were superior than the brown-eyed children for about a week. The Brown Eyes wore dark collars to distinguish them from Blue Eyes from a distance. They had shorter recess, received less affection from the teacher and were not allowed to play with Blue Eyes.
Within a few days, the class was torn asunder. Friends split because Brown Eyes could not play with Blue Eyes; Brown Eyes jealously eyed Blue Eyes enjoying five more minutes of recess; boys threw fists at one another on the playground. When Elliott prodded the two boys for an explanation, the blue-eyed boy explained quite simply that he had called his fellow scuffler a “Brown Eyes” to hurt his feelings.
After showing me some clips of Elliott, my English teacher, Peter Sedlak, lamented the illegality of conducting a similar experiment today in his own classroom. I think my class is too smart for this experiment, but I don’t know about the rest of the community.
Before this experiment, Elliott’s students said that no one should call each other hurtful names and that anyone should be allowed to befriend one another. This experiment shows that diversity can exist without conflict unless society deems a particular trait to be better than another trait. Furthermore, we see that this kind of discrimination, which is based off a meaningless reason, hurts any unified community.
While discrimination can be reminiscent of Elliot’s classroom experiment, discrimination also exists to preserve diversity. Despite the irony of maintaining diversity by discriminating, such as affirmative action and quotas for college admissions, no one can deny the advantages of a diverse community. Approaching the world from various perspectives rather than through one lens yields an endless reservoir of information and innovation.
But diversity is important beyond the classroom and the workplace. We learn about the different capabilities of the human being by exploring diverse cultures. Yes, we are capable of building enormous pyramids and temples using limited technology; yes, we are capable of defying nature by concocting vaccines; and yes, we have even stepped on the Moon.
Every individual has his or her own set of strengths and weaknesses, and by coming together with others, we may accomplish the impossible … as we have since the beginning of human history.
Sabina Lee can be contacted at [email protected]
