Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 9, 1993 TAG: 9311100254
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``I still think and react like a racist. The conditioning never stops. It takes a great deal of effort to overcome the continuous conditioning,'' Elliott said recently by telephone from her home in Osage, Iowa, during a break in the lecture circuit that will bring her to Hollins College on Friday.
Elliott will be the special guest speaker during a two-day cultural-diversity conference aimed at fostering racial and cultural understanding. A group of cultural-awareness consultants from Visions, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit organization, will facilitate.
Elliott said that racist conditioning reinforces the idea that what's white - specifically, white male - is right. It permeates the media and all facets of our lives until it is believed on some level by everyone. Reactions to the conditioning persist even among those who think they are not racists.
``It's the way we refuse to make eye contact with a minority. It's the way we clutch our purse or walk close to the building or cross the street if we see a group of black men approaching. It's the way we feel threatened by a group of people of color. It's complimenting a woman in the workplace by telling her she acts like a man or complimenting an African-American by saying I don't think of you as black,'' Elliott said.
Elliott first gained notoriety in 1968 with her ``Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes'' discrimination experiment, conducted on the students in her third-grade class at an all-white, all-Christian school where she was teaching in Riceville, Iowa. Hoping to show the students what discrimination feels like, she separated them by eye color - a characteristic over which they had no control - and treated one group negatively and one positively.
``I was amazed at how quickly my blue-eyed students and my brown-eyed students became what I allowed them to be,'' Elliott said. ``Immediately, brown-eyed people became obnoxious, arrogant, overbearing, condescending, rude disgusting people. And my blue-eyed students became angry and sad and withdrawn.''
The experiment was the subject of ABC TV's Peabody-award winning documentary, ``The Eye of the Storm''; and PBS' Frontline's ``A Class Divided'' and Florida Public TV's ``The Eye of the Beholder,'' which won Emmy Awards.
Elliott personally was a recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education. She said that her views have caused her to be called a traitor to her race, hit, threatened with a knife and to receive several death threats. Descriptions of the diminutive educator/lecturer/ consultant almost always include the adjectives feisty and eccentric.
``Sure, I'm eccentric in the sense of not being in the center,'' Elliott said. ``But I'm not crazy. A society that bases self-image on the amount of chemicals in your skin, that's crazy.''
She said that racism is partly driven by economics, but its real motivating force is power among white males.
``Even those with little power still have the power of their whiteness,'' Elliott said. ``No matter what they are, they can still believe it is better than a `nigger.'''
Elliott said that fear of loss of that power perpetrates further racism, including denial that the problem of racism exists, which became acceptable under the Reagan and Bush administrations. Even the push to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement is an attempt to keep America white-male dominated as long as possible, she maintains.
But she predicts that because of the low birth rates of white males, eventually demographics will win out and within the next century white men will have to rely on the very people whom they now call inferior to keep the country going.
Elliott said she considers current terms such as ``cultural diversity,'' ``diversity awareness,'' and even the name of the Hollins conference, ``Celebrating Diversity'' as euphemisms necessary so that whites won't resist learning about racism. But she concedes that if racism is to ever end, we must begin tackling it somewhere.
Although she is white, Elliott said she cares about racism because it hurts everyone. She said that as an educator, she believes in helping people overcome ignorance. Plus, the world can no longer be defined in terms of just the United States.
``Planethood is here. Our community is the world,'' she said.
The Hollins conference aims to foster a clearer perspective of the world community through understanding of cultural and racial issues. The Visions facilitators are Angela R. Bryant, a specialist in applying judicial principles to interpersonal problem solving and organizational development; Thomas Shelden Griggs, an organizational development and training consultant; Gerald Jackson, a specialist in black psychology and cross-cultural psychotherapy; Wekesa Olatunji Madzimoyo, a specialist in intervention strategies for unlearning the negative mental/emotional programming experienced by blacks as a result of racism and classism; and Joan E. Schoenhals, a specialist in gender issues, and lesbian/gay/bisexual issues.
Conference attendance will be limited to faculty and students of Hollins and neighboring colleges. However, the general public is invited to attend Elliott's three-hour presentation in the Dana Science Building, Babcock Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Friday.
Keywords:
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by CNB