Middle school's 'social experiment' for Black History Month sparked bullying, says angry mother
A school’s “cultural diversity” experiment for Black History Month caused bullying and discrimination, according to one angry parent.
On Friday, students at Emma Sansom Middle School in Gadsden, Ala., participated in a random social experiment designed to show the concept of privilege, according to WBRC. Teachers asked half the kids to be in the “Privileged/white people” group by wearing identifying gold wristbands, and the other be in the “Oppressed/black people” group and wear purple.
Kids were treated differently based on the color of their bands — kids wearing gold walked the hallways first and sat in front of the class, and those wearing purple were grouped in the back. Kids ate at separate lunch tables, per their colors, and even used different doorways.
“It’s to teach tolerance, that’s what it was all about,” Tony Reddick, superintendent of the Gadsden City Schools, told WBRC, explaining that he modeled the study after a famous discrimination experiment in a third-grade classroom.
In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Iowa teacher Jane Elliot taught her students the meaning of discrimination by giving brown-eyed kids green armbands and telling them, “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room. They are cleaner and they are smarter,” according to Smithsonian magazine. The blue-eyed children were treated as inferior and as a result, everyone fulfilled stereotypes — brown-eyed kids became overconfident bullies and the “blues” withdrew, performing badly in class.
When Elliot belittled the brown-eyed children and uplifted those with blue eyes, kids who experienced poor treatment felt more sympathetic toward their peers.
But Emma Sansom eighth-grader Jasmine Williams claimed her school’s experiment led to unintentional bullying, her mother Amanda Branco said on Facebook.
“I AM HOT RIGHT NOW!!! My daughter’s school decided since its Black History Month, they would be extra. They segregated the school, blacks from whites. Have them use different doors, bathrooms, tables. She said kids were using the ‘N’ word…my kids were not raised to see color. We’re not raised to see another human as less of an equal. So you are going to show them the exact opposite?” Branco said her daughter called her parents crying that day, begging to be picked up early.
“I think it was teaching children it’s ok to bully,” Williams told WBRC. “There were kids telling each other to get out of the bathroom and calling each other the N-word.”
Branco told WBRC, “When you have kids who are not mature enough to comprehend the impact this is having, or that it did many years ago, they find it a joke to have a chance to bully these other students. So I don’t think it accomplished anything except teaching them what racism really is.”
And that was the point, says Reddick, who declared that the experiment was successful, but that based on the conflicting takeaway, it won’t be replicated.
The school and Branco didn’t reply to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment.
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