The rise of Black Lives Matter and the protests against police brutality this spring have led me to reconnect with a high school program I helped to start back in 1983, The Shaker Heights High School Student Group on Race Relations (SGORR.) This reconnection was also sparked by attending the memorial service for Marcia Jaffe, the woman who served as the group’s advisor and is the reason that the program thrived over the past several decades. I have been moved to meet many people now in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who were important contributors to SGORR when they were in high school decades after me. SGORR alumni are now organizing conversations among themselves to share their perspectives and experiences about race relations in our adult lives.
The good news is that this program has created space for dialogue about racial issues in the Shaker Heights Public Schools. The program’s main work is having high school students go to elementary school classrooms three days per year to discuss race issues, particularly the social and academic divisions along racial lines that seem to grow as students transition from elementary school to middle school to high school. This program seems to have had a solid impact on many of us. Unfortunately, many of the institutional issues remain difficult to overcome, and the experiences of black and white students in the school system are still often vastly different. Nevertheless, it has been a joy to meet SGORR alumni and have some initial conversations in these hard times.
One of the central items in the SGORR curriculum has been the film “Eye of the Storm” in which Jane Elliott powerfully demonstrates the impact of prejudice and power by treating her second- grade students differently based on their eye color. This documentary deeply affected me as a teen, and my friends and I felt it was one of the first things to utilize in SGORR. Jane Elliott has gone on to be do trainings with adults in all walks of life, and there was also a reunion film of the students from the original Eye of the Storm watching themselves a number of years later. There are too many links to include, but several are floating around social media right now.
These videos are enough to center a graduate program or a lifetime’s work. In this space, I want to focus on one aspect of Jane Elliott’s work: the impact of racism on those deemed “better.” In her exercises, the way the “superior” individuals behave is appalling. One young student suggests she carry around a yardstick as a tool to keep the “inferior” kids in order. Other remind her to tell the lunch workers that the “inferior” kids have to go to the back of the line and can’t ask for seconds. Another “superior” boy teases his now “inferior” friend during recess until they come to blows.
It is mind-boggling. When you see Jane Elliott do her work with adults, the same behaviors emerge. She has found a way to shine some light on the impact of racism on the “superior” group. It made me cringe then. It alarms me now. It can be hard to put into words, but the simple “meanness” is outrageous. The impact of systemic racism on the attitudes and behavior of the falsely empowered is often overlooked, as analysis of racism often focuses (rightfully) on the victims who suffer the abuse. Jane Elliott forces us to notice and consider what happens when we offer people inflated status. These are ideas I have carried forward in my life since that time.
This film connects powerfully for me with Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo created a simulated prison and randomly assigned the roles of prisoners and guards to his college student volunteers. The behavior of the “guards” turned so horrifying that he had to call off the experiment. There is much in Zimbardo’s experiment that has been questioned or challenged over the years, but the basic premise still resonates for me. In fact, whenever I say that sometimes when I was a school teacher I felt like I was expected to act like a prison guard, I think of this study. While my transgressions were relatively petty, my feelings about my worst behaviors in that school culture are certainly among the factors that led me to resign and create a different system in which to work with teens – one with very different power and authority dynamics.
The power of Jane Elliott, Philip Zimbardo, and other social psychologists supports the conclusion that in reaction to the police brutality we are seeing, it doesn’t make sense to talk about “good cops” and “bad cops.” In schools, in terms of abuse of authority, we can’t talk about “good teachers” and “bad teachers.” All of us can act badly in certain circumstances. Those circumstances include, among other items: being unobserved, knowing one won’t be held accountable, viewing the less powerful victims as less human, witnessing peers model bad behavior, and having a system of rules and leaders that encourage punitive enforcement.
I add my voice to those who insist that instead of looking for “the one bad apple,” we need to look at the barrel itself. We need to avoid putting ourselves in circumstances that allow for anonymous, power-based behavior, and we need to eliminate such settings out of existence as much as possible.
The shocking part of the George Floyd murder is that so many of the elements we would want for harm reduction were in place. The officer knew he was being videotaped, he had three colleagues with him, and there were many witnesses on the scene. The knowledge that there are so many more videos, and deaths, and injustice is overwhelming. For me, the video of Walter Scott running away with his hands up in the air is haunting. There are so many names to be said. And yet, as people protest, the police brutality continues, boldly.
The solution cannot be limited to a case-by-case holding of the perpetrators accountable, as necessary as such accountability would be for a first step. Include me with Jane Elliott and Philip Zimbardo and others who contend that we need to investigate the conditions that lead those in authority to abuse their power so viciously and so frequently. And let us take this conversation beyond law enforcement to our own field of teaching: what leads teachers to sometimes abuse our power and act in hurtful ways? What needs to be changed within schools to minimize and ultimately eliminate these moments?
North Star staff and community members will be exploring our own issues related to diversity in the coming days, weeks, and months. There is much for all of us to consider and to do. Jane Elliott’s work was one of my starting points, and I hope it provides a spark for many of you. For those of you looking for more current thinkers, I recommend starting with Oprah Winfrey’s
recent two-part conversation, Where Do We Go From Here (Oprah Winfrey leads the conversation speaking directly with Black thought leaders, activists and artists about systemic racism and the current state of America. Featured guests include: Stacey Abrams, Charles M. Blow, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Ava DuVernday, Jennifer Eberhardt, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram Kendi, David Oyelowo, Rashad Robinson and Bishop William J. Barber II.)
Postscript: Black Lives Matter. I find the resistance to this phrase infuriating. Resistance does not imply that “All Lives Matter”; it implies that “Black Lives Don’t Matter.” I wish there were some way to get this idea across to those who find it hard to understand, and the best source I’ve seen is a comedy bit my son forwarded to me by Michael Che. Please watch.
