Jane Elliott - A Conversation about Race, Racism, and Education in America

[Music] we can learn if we could educate individuals in this society to change their behavior and change their language we can change the level of racism in this country [Music] my name is omid futuri my own training is in social psychology which i apply to working with faculty and students to help help all of us understand how we can better enhance the student learning experience and i i can tell this will be an educational experience for myself my colleagues who are also on the call if i can just pass it off to them to quickly introduce themselves um before we jump in that would be wonderful yeah jay my name is jason thompson it's nice to meet you uh i oversee diversity and inclusion for wgu and have worked as a diversity inclusion professional probably for the last 25 plus years and uh trained as a sociologist so my degrees are in sociology but it's nice to meet you and looking forward to the conversation okay hi miss jane my name is talia i've been in multicultural marketing and diversity for about 15 years worked in nascar usa swimming usa track and field and i've been at western governors university for about three months now and working on jason's team wonderful glad to meet you both of you thank you well jane as as you can as you can tell um we are just really keen to jump in and hear from you i know that this has been a long journey for you this began uh what is it almost 50 more than 50 years ago with with the assassination of martin luther king i wonder if you can take us back there and just shed some light on what happened what your reaction was to that assassination and how that sparks the motivation to do your exercise which is now pretty infamous but again if you could maybe just spend a minute describing what that exercise was for those audience members who may may not be as familiar with that martin luther king jr had been one of our heroes in in the third grade in riceville iowa our lesson plan for the next day was to learn the sioux indian prayer that says oh great spirit keep me from ever judging a man until i've walked a mile in s moccasins i took the teepee home that night that my previous third graders had made i was going to wash it iron it dry it iron it and we're going to put it up in the classroom the next day i walked in my door my back door the telephone was ringing i answered it my sister said is your television on i said no she said you better put it on i said why because they shot him i said who we shoot this time we were in a shooting room she said martin luther king jr and then my world stopped and when i remember that i get sick to my stomach because my world stopped spinning at that moment for a few minutes i swear to you nothing moved i couldn't believe that this country would be evil enough to kill a man whose only mission was to bring us hope and hope for me is an acronym for holding on to positive energy and that was he what he was about i was furious i was absolutely furious so i washed and ironed and washed the tv dried it got the kids to bed fed him got him to bed put the spread the tb out on the living room floor got ready to iron it and there was walter cronkite saying to three leaders of the black community when our leader was killed his widow held us together who's going to keep your people in line i thought oh my god did he really say that when our leader was killed did he really think that jfk was the leader only of white people his widow held us in line see how powerful how how how capable we are and how civilized we are who's going to keep your people in line i see up until that very moment i thought that people of all colors were my people i was furious so i changed the channel and there's that dan rather talking to two black males and to him then he said don't junior girls think that you should feel sympathy for us white people because we can't feel the anger at this killing that you need girls can and i thought sweet jesus how can he not feel anger at the killing of another human being wanted the teepee up i threw it into the closet i closed the door on it and i went and got my husband's supper he was coming home from working on second shift and when he came in the door he said they killed him didn't they i said yes they did he said what are you gonna do i said i'm going to teach my students the sioux indian prayer that says o great spirit keep me from ever judging a man until i've walked a mile in his moccasins by allowing them those little white third graders in all white all-christian community to walk in the shoes of a child of color for a day he said jane what are you going to do i said i'm going to separate my student by the color of their eyes he said you're going to lose your job i said daryl if i lose my job by then i was crying and he was he was trying to keep me from crying but you can't keep me from crying by saying you're going to lose your job if you do this i said darrell if i lose my job for doing the right thing i don't want to teach you he said we need that money we've got four kids to race i said i'm gonna i'm gonna do this exercise now you see my husband knew something that i didn't know he was riding back and forth to charles city from riceville every day and he was listening to the things that people those men said on the way to and from work and coming back that day from charles city evidently the conversation was really all about those n-word people and how now we don't have to deal with that one i didn't know that because i was born and raised in riceville my great-great-grandfather was one of the first settlers there and i was sure that i knew the people in that community i knew nothing about the people in that community but i learned rather quickly because after i did the blue eyed brown eyed exercise i went into my classroom the next morning i separated my after we talked about the killing of martin luther king jr and i asked him if they had any idea how it would feel to be something other than white in this country no would you like no yeah yeah i said would you like to do something today that will help you to know that yeah yeah i said well then i'm going to separate you according to eye color are you sure you want to do that yeah miss let's do this because everything we did in my classroom was fun they thought this was going to be fun i knew it wasn't going to be fun but i didn't know how unfun it was going to be so i separated them according to the color of their eyes and i put blue-eyed people on the bottom of the first day because i'm blue-eyed and i didn't want the power structure to be with the majority group so i put the blue-eyed people on the bottom the first day and i said now blue-eyed people move your chairs to the back of the room brown eyed people come to the front once they got all settled into place i said now blue white people are smartest brown eyed people they're as clean as brown eyed people they aren't as civilized as brown eyed people and at that moment i learned more than i learned in any sociology class little brown eyed debbie sitting in the front row looked up at me and said how come you're the teacher here if you got them blue eyes and i thought oh my god there it is this is what it's like to be a teacher of color in a room full of children who think that they are superior to that person because of the color of their skin i had talked about racism i had read about racism i had no knowledge whatsoever about what it's like to be on the receiving end of racism but i learned that day i learned some horrendous things i watched four brown-eyed boys were dyslexic and who had had trouble with reading and spelling read words i knew they couldn't read and spell words i knew they couldn't spell the day they were on the top in that exercise because i told them they had magic eyes and at the end of the day little brown eyed billy came up and said miss elliot where's my spelling paper i said what do you want it for billy he said i want to show it to my mother she thinks i can't spell and i can and he started to cry and so did i because he didn't find out until april 5th of his third grade year that he could spell and he could read because he had been living down to people's expectations of him and his former teachers based their expectations of him on what they knew about his older brother and his father on the other hand i had in my classroom that year carol the loser and minister's daughter she came in reading at the sixth grade level in february she had never multiplied i taught her how to multiply the first 15 minutes of math class she never made a mistake in multiplication again until the day she had the wrong color eyes and on that day that tall blonde blue-eyed pale-faced child walked with her shoulders hunched as if to ward off an expected blow she stumbled when she crossed the classroom she made mistakes in reading she made mistakes in spelling and she forgot how to multiply now i could have stopped the exercise because of what i had learned at that moment but i went into the teacher's lounge at noon to share with the other two third grade teachers what was happening in my classroom i needed some support i told there were about 10 people 10 teachers in the room i told them what was happening in my classroom the day after martin luther king jr was killed when i finished telling them what was going on the younger of the two third grade teachers said and she was probably 54 at the time i don't know how you have time for all that extra stuff that's all i can do to teach reading writing arithmetic well as far as i was concerned she hadn't taught reading writing and arithmetic yet the other one said and she was over 60 years old had been molding young minds in that community for many years she looked up at me and said i don't know why you're doing that i thought it was about time they shot that son of a now i could make it easier for you by not saying what she said but it isn't easy the words we use are not easy they aren't kind they aren't gentle they aren't accepting and they aren't sociologically right they are crazy they are the result of our judging people on the basis of physical characteristics over which they have no control and we say ugly things and get away with it because we're pale faces i couldn't believe this i had thought i would stop the exercise at noon i decided at that moment no ha ha i'm not going to let any child leave my classroom being as ignorant as those two teachers and all those who laughed and smiled and nodded at hearing those remarks that's ignorance i decided that my children would spend the day with blue eyed people on the bottom brown eyed people on the top and i would have to send them home at after school and this was on friday so they would have all weekend either to process it and to get over it or to come back angry i didn't know what they would do with it if i had known i probably wouldn't have been i probably wouldn't have done the exercise in the first place i learned an awful lot about people in small towns where there are no people of color and where they when they found out what i was doing said why is she doing that here we don't have any racism here we don't have any n-words you don't have to have people of color to have racism all you have to have is ignorant people who who suffer from self-imposed ignorance because people we could stop being ignorant where race is concerned if we decided to educate ourselves on monday i went back into the classroom and the most amazing thing happened i thought because i had heard the blue eyed boys talk about what they were going to do to the brownies when they got on top um right they were talking about that on friday i heard them in the restroom saying what they were going to do to the brownies so i was sure that monday was going to be elle walked into the classroom reversed the exercise and yep it was just amazing blue-eyed people were much less vicious to the brown-eyed people than the brown-eyed people had been to them oh my god and i did just what you're doing i thought this can't be real look at these kids they suffered at the hands of these little monsters and look at how kindly they're treating them look at how they are refusing to do to them what was done to them so on tuesday before we discussed the thing at all each child wrote a four paragraph composition telling how the child felt on friday how the child felt on monday who martin luther king jr was and what discrimination is after they had finished writing we got in a circle in the magic circle what you say will be accepted and i said to those little kids people you blue eyed kids said you were going to get even with the brownies that's what you said you were going to do on friday why didn't you get even and those blue eyed kids sat here and every year after that said because we found out how it feels to be treated that way when we were on the bottom and we weren't going to make anybody feel the way we felt when we were on the bottom now if pale faces in this country if what we call white people in this country and we've got to stop using the word white because you can see my shirt it's white my hair is white my skin is not white there are no white people this isn't this is the color of human skin human beings come in different shades of brown if we're going to if we're going to refer to skin color then we have to do we have to change the words we have to change our language instead of calling people white and black what if you are anemic and don't have it if you are if you don't have enough iron in your blood to keep you healthy you're called anemic then if you don't have enough melanin in your skin to protect your cells from the damaging rays of the sun then you must be melanemic and if you have more melanin if you have if you're darker then you are melanaceous and if you have a light of it you're melonic and the word melonic is in the dictionary so if we can use melonic to describe darkness we can use melanaceus and melanemic to describe skin colors instead of white and black a few things that strike me already is uh you have this focus on a few things as a as it pertains to how we come to hold certain beliefs and experiences i know that you've received a lot of pushback even threats of violence um on you and your family for the work that you've done criticism for the the exercise that you have facilitated in your classroom and i know you've replicated that with companies and organizations for many years and what strikes me is that what you're trying to do is to to induce an experience of empathy rather than just portray the facts or try to get people to sympathize with what it feels like to be uh on on the receiving end of some of this discrimination um i wonder is that is that an intentional absolutely and that's another thing that's another thing you have to know we have consistently for the last i don't know 2 000 years taught the golden rule do unto others as you would have others do unto you treat others the way you want to be treated no i don't have the right to treat everybody the way i want to be treated i know that you as a young man do not want to be treated the way i want to be treated i don't have that right i believe in the platinum rule which says do unto others as others would have you do unto them treat others the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated i know that when i am on a plane and i have a piece of luggage to put me over head rack if some young person says to me can i put that up for you i say absolutely i must have a good parents they'll put it up for me however if that young man has a piece of luggage to in the overhead rack if i say to him sonny can i put that up for you he's going to say absolutely not i can take care of it myself i don't have the right to treat others the way i want to be treated i have to treat others the way they want to be treated and we'd better learn that in this country today we better start treating treating people the way they want to be treated and realize when i when i've been a bunch of people and there's a man coming toward the door and i added him i opened the door and he looks like i've just slapped him right across the face how dare i open the door for him well you see i was treating him i treat him the way i want to be treated that's a mistake after after that happened to me three times i thought now the golden rule ain't working here honey you treat people the way they want to be treated you let them open the door for you there are customs and rituals in this society that are there because of things like the golden rule we need to start practicing the platinum rule treat others the way they want to be treated not the way you want to be treated go ahead what strikes me as being really interesting about your exercise for all these years is that you are able to facilitate that perspective taking that you're able to get people to feel what it feels like potentially to to be discriminated against which otherwise you're just guessing as to what other individuals might want how they might want to be treated but until you have that experience um then it's really hard to guess at that is that it's it's called experiential learning i learned it at the university of northern iowa many years ago and john dewey a famous educator said we learn by doing and if you give children the opportunity to have these experiences they will learn from those experiences you don't have to put it in a book they will learn it by doing it and it will be it will become part of their personality and that indeed is what has happened with the blue eyed brown eyed exercise with the students that i put through from grades three i did i did some with the rights first graders from grades 3 to the age of 85 the oldest person i worked with was 85 every one of those people had an experience that they hadn't had before people of color have the experience of being on the top and watching other people have to be treated the way they have been they have had to accept being treated in this country the last 300 years people who are have been accustomed to being on top all of a sudden find out why a whole lot of people are angry but they wonder why they are able to keep on keeping on in spite of what we do to them if what we do to them hurts as much on a daily basis as it hurts for those white people to go through that exercise for a couple of hours i've been hit by a white male during this exercise i've had a knife pulled on me they ran me they took me three carloads of blacks took me out of uniontown pennsylvania at midnight because the teachers that i put through the blue eyed brown eyed exercise in a very informal way in the morning called the superintendent said if they don't get that b word out of town we're gonna shoot her and they were absolutely serious so they raced me out of town to avoid that happening i this you aren't allowed to say we're wrong to pale faces because if i'm right we've been wrong for a lot of years and we have been wrong for a lot of years but we don't have to stay that way we can learn can i ask you why you've been doing this work for all this time i mean certainly i think no one would blame you for retiring and i think you have retired as a schoolteacher and yet you continue to work you can continue to take the time to speak with us and others trying to share this message and and educate individuals despite there being direct costs to you you've mentioned being threatened having a knife pulled on you why do you do this why do racists keep doing it why do racists keep doing it you tell me you tell me why racists perpetuate this lie go along with this lie cooperate with this lie accept this lie as long as they perpetuate this i'll keep on doing this exercise if you want me to stop all you have to do is stop acting like a fool and stop judging people by the color of their skin then i can stop i'd love to retire someday i will i'm not looking forward to it happening right away i think i thought when barack obama was elected i thought we're on our way i don't have to do this anymore people are getting smarter i didn't realize that there was a whole about 40 percent of the population would go underground while we had a black man in the white house and wait until they got their chance to get even and now for four years they've been getting even you know it and i know it we have qnon and we have oath keepers and we have the kkk and we have all these and these proud boys i don't want proud boys i don't want i didn't raise any proud boys i raised wise men i think we have to situate we have to have a society in which we admire wise men not proud boys and people who may point their finger at me but not a gun there's a big difference between wise men and proud boys and we have in this country in the last four years we have encouraged people like the kkk and the oath keepers and the proud boys and we have to put a stop to it i know that education is a core part of your mission that um you you i've heard you say many times in our past conversations and anytime i've looked at a recording of you that education seems to be a central channel by which we can we can achieve that goal um i would love to hear more about how you think education to date has or has not served us well and how maybe we can better educate ourselves our children and each other um around this very difficult topic you have to go this is one thing you can do go to my website download the printed learning materials the first one is a set of typical statements that white folks make that think they aren't racist go through those typical statements and read the first one and then go to the clarification of that statement and realize how that statement is perceived by those who are on the receiving end of it and then somebody will say well i didn't mean to be racist it doesn't matter what you meant by what you did said what matters is how it is perceived and if what you are saying can be perceived as racist or sexist or ageist or homophobic or ethnocentric change your vocabulary you have more than a few hundred words in your vocabulary particularly if you have been to college i know this you know more than 25 or 30 words go through that those typical statements and the clarifications and then go to the commitments to combat racism eighteen things that you can do in your own environment to deal with your own racism and racism is an individual problem now somebody's going to say it's societal well societies are made up of individuals if we could educate individuals in this society to change their behavior and change their language we could change the level of racism in this country they did an attitudinal survey with the third fourth fifth and sixth graders in the riceville schools several years after i'd done the exercise three years or four years after i'd done the exercise the first time they conducted that same enter that same attitudinal survey with a nearby comparable community third fourth fifth and sixth graders um a professor from the university of northern iowa did that after he had compiled his results he called me said you need to know what i found out and i thought oh lord here we go he said the children who had been the students who have been in your class in your third grade class were less racist in their attitudes as expressed on this survey than were all the other students in the third fourth and fifth third fourth fifth and sixth grades he said and that's important but here the most important thing is all the students in the riceville school were less racist as expressed on this survey than were all the students in the nearby comparable community he said what this says is if we could convince a third of the population we could change this situation and i and that's why i believe i absolutely believe that education i'm an educator the word educator comes from the root duck deuce which means lead the prefix e which means out the suffix a d e which means the act of and the suffix or which means one who does an educator is one who is engaged in the act of leading people out of ignorance and you can't do that by teaching that columbus discovered america if you haven't read the book nile valley contributions to civilization and you are an educator or a sociologist or a human being you need to read that book and realize that the people who discovered this continent with the same people who populated every other land mass on the face of the earth originally and they came from countries in africa the first people who discovered this continent came from africa and we'd better start to recognize that and to appreciate that and to teach that to our children because every one of us if we would trace our dna back as far as we could we would find that a percentage of our dna came from a country in africa that's the way it is because we are all members of the same race and that race started out in africa and that's where we all came from it's time to get over it it's time to teach the truth instead of perpetuating the lie the lie is going to kill us you know you've obviously taught a lot of students over the years i don't know if you could share maybe some of those interactions that the students maybe that you taught 20 years ago and how you've impacted their lives and the stories of this well this coming summer this summer in july i think one of the students who's in the film the eye of the storm was in my classroom in third grade is meeting with a group of lawyers and social workers in rochester minnesota and he has asked me to come to the meeting so that we can share with those folks what we learned he and i learned as a result of him going through that exercise and me doing the exercise with him if you could see the follow follow-up film to the film the eye of the storm 10 years after those kids graduated from high school pbs sent a film crew in to film and i think the name of it is the class a class divided see if you can find a class divider and those kids came back some of them with their little babies with them and we sat down in a classroom in riceville and we watched that film together the eye of the storm and they were laughing through it and then they said will you show it again we couldn't hear what we were saying because we were laughing i said show it again so they showed it again and the second time through those young adults sat there many of them were crying because they had forgotten how miserable they were on that day and they had forgotten how ugly that whole situation is then we turned on the lights and we got in a circle and discussed what what they had learned i couldn't have scripted something that made me happier than that than that discussion was you need to see that discussion get the film the class divided and look at it and those kids were not paid to be there i simply called him and said bill peters says he's talked to to um pbs and they want to film this reunion is that all right with you so they came in just those 16 and there's 50 some kids in the class i only had 16. and what's interesting about this group is all 16 of those kids are moderately too severely dyslexic when i got them they were reading at the first grade level by the time they left me they were reading at the fourth grade level and some of their independent reading levels were sixth grade because they had been living down to teachers expectations of them until i got them but i know what the dyslexic person does and i know how to teach the dyslexic person make no mistake about that now sociologists now say there's no such thing as a dyslexic person well tell that to henry ford and then maybe if you can find him or just read about him and find out that yes there is such a person and those kids one of those all when the principal gave me my class rule that year when those kids were in third grade he said these kids aren't going to learn pass them on and get them out of here they're never going to amount to anything anyway they're all going to drop out of school but do what you can and i thought some ugly thoughts because i really admired that moment man up until that moment so then i went to the to the office and looked at their cumulative files every one of those kids had high reading high high math scores and low reading and spelling score so i knew what i was dealing with so i simply taught them how to read and how to deal with the printed word every one of them graduated from high school except one who was killed in an alcohol related accident two weeks before graduation and that makes me sick to think about it too because it didn't have to happen it didn't have to happen anyway those are at least six of the rest of them went to two or four or more years of college one became a junior and senior high school principal and did that until two or three years ago when he went out and started a business on his own and one became a lawyer they became successful people after they left third grade because they stopped believing the negative things that teachers had said about them before they got to third grade and they could say to the teachers this is elliott says i can read and then nobody could force them to live down their expectations again after that so i have a question um year after year as you did this experience with the students in your class were were the parents more receptive of their kids going through this and did they fight it every single year no every year somebody would call in and say don't put my kid in that elliot's classroom and every year number of people would call and say i want my kid in elliot's classroom that was a problem for the principal because he had to split it you know he i had to have a third of them and he would call and say uh miss ellie i'm going to put this child in there and one i'll never forget the one he called and said um mrs zelle you need to know that so-and-so said i don't want my kid in that n-word lover's classroom but i want to learn to read so put him in there anyway and i thought thank you god all right i'm gonna teach this kid to read and while i'm teaching him to read i'm gonna teach him something else that that parent doesn't want him to have but that parent realized that he was gonna have to take the bitter with the sweet he fig he couldn't teach his child to read but he could teach him to hate people who were different from himself but i could give him a number of books that he could read that would prove that people of color are different but they aren't negative i could do that once i got him to learn to read i could have him in a situation where his father couldn't de-program him for where race is concerned and and that's that's why i say the answer to this problem is education if we could lead people out of the ignorance of racism we could change this society there's not a doubt in my mind but we could do that can i ask in terms of the resistance that maybe you've seen in either the exercises that you facilitated or just in the general public where do you think that resistance comes from um from ignorance from ignorance from not knowing the truth and i i used to go home i used to go up and talk to my dad after school and tell him what was going on and he'd say are you sure you're right i'd say yes then do what you do do what's right god let the s-o-b's complain you do what's right and i kept on doing what was right because my dad said well you do the right thing my mother would say you better stop it because nobody is going to like us in this town and i think well there's only a thousand people in town how much damage can they do us well they could do you a lot of damage they could kill your business is what they did you know nobody would eat in the restaurant owned by my parents after i did the exercise it was unfortunate but on the other hand when i when dad and i talked about he said that's right i never wanted i never wanted to wait on the sobs anyways he was he had no you know i had no time for this nonsense and i'll never forget the day my father saw the first film that was made in my classroom canadian broadcasting corporation sent a film crew in my classroom the second year i did the exercise they sent me a copy of that film i took it up to my parents house and showed it to my father and mother and after it was over my father who was 59 years old at the time a farmer had fathered seven kids raised six stood up in his blue bib overalls took his red handkerchief out of the back pocket of those overalls who his nose wiped his eyes and said and i'll never forget this i wish somebody had taught me that when i was nine years old now sociologists can say how can you do that to those poor little children because they will never have to say as my father did i wish somebody had taught me that when i was nine years old because they will know it somebody taught it to them when they were nine years old and it changed the way they see their world and themselves in it and the way they live their lives and when you see the film a class divided you realize that it worked for those kids and if it will work for those 16 kids it will work for a third of the population of the united states i've done this exercise all over the united states and i have very seldom had people say something negative about it at the end every time we do the thing and they write their their what i learned and the things that they write are the things that if i could have scripted them that's what i would have written i know it works something that i've seen in one of your uh recorded sessions quite fascinating and i believe it's when you to an audience ask all of the white participants to stand up if they want to have the experiences that they think black individuals have on a day-to-day basis and you realize that no one stands up and what's powerful about that is that it conveys that that there is a level of awareness in terms of the injustice and i think that's a really powerful thing can you speak to that a little bit more and how that plays out right every time i do and every time i give a speech now i say to the audience members will every white person in this room who wants to spend the rest of his or her life being treated the way we treat our black citizens please stand nobody stands several years ago maybe three years ago i was doing a program and i said to the group well every person in this room who considers himself or herself a member of the black race stan now the white race now the red race now the yellow race now we got them all up i said now well every person in this room who considers himself or herself a member of the human race please sit down they all sat down and a woman stood up an older not older she bought her 45 years old and she said well i'm afraid that when they get power there i said they she said yes when those people get power they're going to want to do to us what we've done to them i said that's your major fear isn't it you're afraid that if they get on top you're going to suffer she said yes i am i said they you think they want to get even with you yes i do i said okay let's find out well every person in this room who considers himself or herself a member of the black race and who wants to get evil with all white folks please stand three young black males stood the rest of them there were 1500 people in this room and half of them were black and the rest of those people of color just turned and looked at them like are you stupid and i said there you see they don't want to get reading with all of us she says okay i said do you feel better now she said i think i do i said good now let's be honest about it you feel better because they don't want to get even with all of us right yes i said now well every black person in this room who wants to even with one or two white people please stand they all leap to their feet cheering and laughing and high-fiving one another and just tickled to death and i said you feel better now she said well no i don't i said here's the solution make sure that your behavior is such that you aren't one of the one or two they want to get even with does that make sense to you she said i think so and i said to the group does that make sense to you and immediately they're all cheering and laughing and high-fiving one another again so if we would treat people fairly we wouldn't be the ones they want to get even with i doubt that many people of color want to get even with me but i know that a whole lot of pale faces really want to get even with me and they can't do it because number one i'm so old that if they kill me i don't care my husband is gone my oldest son is gone i would like to be where they are and that the ones that are left will remember me not a doubt about that but when when i'm on a college campus and there are those three little boys wearing that red cap that says make america hate again it says great again but it means hate again and they're talking about well i'm talking well i'm talking they're doing this and i finally stopped and i say look fellas i know what you're thinking about and i know what you're talking about do you want to see me dead because of what i do to attempt to lessen the degree of racism in this country i know that and you can kill me that doesn't matter i'll go someplace better than this make no mistake about this however you need to know that if you kill me because of what i'm doing you might make a martyr out of me and then you might have to spend the rest of your lives celebrating jane elliott day once a year now do you want to do that and they'll go no no no no i say fine then shut up shut up and listen while i'm talking and they shut up and listen however they've done themselves a real disservice because at that point all the young men of color have have nailed them they see who they are they have been identified they know who they are and you can see those young men of color talking and looking at one another and pointing at those three guys and i think fellas you just made a really big mistake if you're going to be a racist do it quietly don't do it in the in a great big auditorium with a really disgusted old white woman up there who doesn't have to take it and who has no fear i gave up fear the the day the night the morning i had to open a motel room door and look out and see all these windows looking down on that court and realized that behind one of those windows might be the person who was sent there to shoot me and i was terrified so i backed up and i closed the door and i remembered as if it happened yesterday i thought now jane you've got a decision to make you can stay here and be paralyzed with fear and never do this job again or you can walk out of here and figure you don't have anything to fear that they aren't going to shoot you and go home i had a husband and four children at home i took my luggage cart in my hand i put my purse over my shoulder and i stepped in my shoulders because i thought if my if my muscles were stiff enough the bullets would bounce off maybe you do strange things when you're scared and i walk quickly i didn't run because i don't think you're afraid i think you run because you're afraid because you run i think the adrenaline starts to run and you have to run in in response to that so i walked quickly to the desk to sign out and when i got there i thought will you damn dummy look what you just did you just allowed them to scare you nearly to death this will never happen again and it has never happened since and i've had some really ugly close encounters of the most disgusting kind but i will not be frightened away and i will not be talked out of the truth it says somewhere ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free when we find out the truth about race in this country we can go ahead and be the nation that we are supposed to be but you can't do you can't follow the constitution until you remember that in the constitution it said that a black person was three first three-fourths three-fifths of a person no no no those people were as racist as the rest of us are but the rest of us have lived long enough now to know that they were wrong in that area they were wrong you know one of the things typically we like to assume about the us is that depending on where you live whether you if you're in the south somehow the south is more racist than the north or has that been your experience when working with children where you are where you are raised is not the point who are who is raising you is the point and if your parents were raised in a racist situation they are going to raise racist children if you think read the book the color of law everybody should get the book the color of law and read it and you will find out that most of the segregation in communities in this country are the result of people lawyers writing laws that segregate people not because of the of the truth but because that's what lawyers learned they learned the lie of race just as all the rest of us did you can't teach what you don't know and that's the reason we have to re-educate every instructor every educator has to read be re-educated where race is concerned every lawyer every banker every member of the military we all have to be re-educated no matter where you live you can live in the most liberal community in the united states and still have people in that community who think they are better than others because of the lack of chemical in their skin it makes no sense racism makes no sense in order to be a racist you have to be a bit of a fool no i don't think the racism is any worse you want to talk about minneapolis that's in the northern part of the united states could that have happened anyplace else of course it could happen in every community in the united states of america as long as we convince people that of the rightness of whiteness we need to get over the idea of black and white and start seeing people as different shades of brown and if you haven't seen them national geographic magazine for april of 2018 you need to take a look at this see these two girls these are twin girls twin girls their mother is so-called white and their father is black now would you call these two girls biracial they aren't biracial people because they both have a human being for a parent both of these have two human parents so they aren't biracial you might want to call them mosaic a mosaic is an art form that is new and beautiful and unique and made of many different elements and that's what these girls are they are not biracial because there's only one race the human race and inside that magazine you will find these pictures of all these different people of different colors look at that look at that every one of them look it every one of them has the name pantone under it and a number you have a number on the pantone color wheel everybody needs to get the pantone color wheel put it on the wall in the classroom and then have the kids go up to it and run their hands over it until they find a color that matches the skin on the back of their hand then go to the thesaurus and look at the synonyms for brown and you will find a synonym that matches practically every one of these because we are all shades of brown this person is a shade of brown this person isn't black this person isn't black this person is a shade of brown and so are we all and i can look at people who say they're black and i can see their the color of their hair which is beautifully black and i can see where their skin stops and their hair begins because we are all shades of brown get over it people black and white are polar opposites white is the color of goodness and purity and black is the color of savagery and evil stop allowing your children to be called names that do not that are misnomers it's time to put a stop to this nonsense it's time to recognize what we are we are all members of the same race when when walter cronkite and dan rather who were the leading reporters are kind of people who told us what we should believe about the news at that time used the kind of language they did i realized that those who said that the longer you stay in school in this country the more bigoted you become were absolutely right because the longer you stay in school the longer you are reinforced in what you learn grades k through eight and most of what you learn grades k through eight was wrong particularly in social studies they should call it anti-social studies because that's what it is i will figure that my life has been complete when we stop celebrating columbus day and start celebrating african-american afro-american day because that's who came to this country in the first place that's who discovered this continent and that's we who we had better start to recognize and appreciate only 18 percent of the population of the earth are white are classified as white 18 did you know that because if you didn't know that you should know that only 18 percent of the population of the earth is classified as white and they aren't white and and you also need to know that within 30 years quite what we call white people in this country will have become a numerical minority that's a fact people benjamin israeli told us there are three kinds of lies lies damn lies and statistics there's a reason for trying to close all the planned parenthood clinics in the last four years you need to know that planned parenthood clinics do many important things for women abortion is not their main thrust and you also need to know that people women got abortions before planned parenthood clinics and they will get abortions after planned parenthood clinics and when you force a woman to have a baby when she doesn't want to have a baby then you have you have told her that she is going to work for nine months and if you've never had a baby you don't know how painful that is and you don't know yeah and if you've ever had to give up a child and you think that'll take care of it no you'll hear that child crying in the night for as long as you live i'm sorry but there we have put the onus on women instead of saying it takes two to make a baby and men better be glad that it does because we now know that you can put two female cells together in a petri dish break down the cell wall and come up with another female person mammal we can do that and rid the world of men i don't want to have that happen i like men why do i like men i like men a lot if that is upsetting to you you have my sympathy and if you were in the military you'd know where to find it but i won't tell you but you need to realize that birth takes two pregnancy takes two if you want to solve the problem then that too takes two we could solve the problem if we would all go together instead of picking out people with that we are going to hold responsible for the fate of humankind i wonder if i can go back to how we began this conversation and you were you were basically explaining what racism is you've mentioned a few times it's this white lie this notion that one race is superior to another and the impact that it has on uh individuals of color people of color i myself come from iran my name uh omid means hope actually um and you also began by talking about hope um interestingly enough as i navigate through our culture in america i find myself feeling the pressures of trying to conform as though i'm playing a game and one of the ways one of the ways i do that is actually i know that people can't say that my name properly and on multiple occasions i've actually thought about changing my name to conform to what i think is the majority or the right perception of how i ought to be named or how i i ought to act in your almost 55 years of doing this work i imagine you've probably heard a lot of individuals experiences as they've navigated the the social dynamics around race what are the things that you've heard how how are people navigating quietly or not quietly how is it impacting individuals and ways that you think are important for others to hear about parents tell me about their sons usually their sons who have tried to bleach their skin using hylex or some other bleach wiping on their skins to try to take the color out of their skin because they are the wrong color i've had people tell me that they were prepared to commit suicide because they couldn't get white because they couldn't ever get right i've had people tell me that their their families disowned them because they went out they married outside their race well you see you can't marry outside your race there's only one race so you can't possibly marry outside your race unless you're dating a martian and we found out that you there they aren't there you don't have to worry about them we have to we have to realize the damage that is done not just to people of color but it's also done to white people because it it constricts us for a lifetime it keeps us from wonderful associations that we might have with people who are different from ourselves it limits our experiential backgrounds by putting us in this place this is the way you have to behave this is what you have to believe we have we we have a lot of power we colorless people have a lot of power we have taken a man who was now they have decided an ethiopian jew called jesus and turned him into a pale-faced man with long brown hair now in the bible he says he had whooped kinky wooly hair and feet of bronze but we don't want to pray to someone who looks like that so we have simply changed jesus into someone we can pray to who looks like us that's one of the problems that we have we have you have to realize that we adjust the world to the environment to fit our needs we have taken that verse in the bible that says and now abideth these three faith love and charity and turned it into faith hope and charity and turned it into faith hope and love because charity means help means selfless giving love is easy charity is hard you have to give up something you have to spend some time and some money but with love all you have to do is just say i just love you and that takes care of the whole problem i can remember when my father would give us equipment after my and there were five of us and he'd start with my oldest brother and whip right down till he got all five was given equipment because my mother would tattle on us about something we had done during the day and she didn't she couldn't control us but he could so he'd give us all equipment and my mother would say to us he's doing this because he loves you and even as a five-year-old i would think could you love me a little less you know come on people we say to people of color well you have that kind of school and and just across the freeway because we love you we built that school no we don't we don't treat people in a loving way you need to quit misquoting the bible if that is your perfect book then quit miscoding it take it as it is instead of adjusting it to fit our needs and now abideth these three faith hope and charity charities tough that's selfless giving love is easy make no mistake about that we use words to keep people in their place words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind we use words to keep you in your place you had best learned that if somebody mispronounces your name it's not because they're ignorant it's because you've got the wrong name why don't you have a more proper name and then we wouldn't have trouble with it we'll call you harry because we can all pronounce that this is what you live with i think when you come to this country and and my daughter married a saudi arabian his name was muhammad abdul muhammad good lord it was interesting but we learned to we learned his name and we learned to love him and we learned to adore my daughter and his two daughters they are absolutely fantastic i've been to saudi arabia would i want to live there no i do not want to see seen the way saudi arabian women are seen and treated and the way they are required to see themselves so yeah there's there are cultural differences and they have the right to that and i have the responsibility to stay away if i don't like it or simply to keep my mouth shut now it's obvious that keeping my mouth shut is one of my biggest troubles it's a real challenge and i've got to learn to do it someday i will i've got a few years left i can do this um i have a three-year-old and a one-year-old and i'm interested in for as they're going through school short of doing experiences like you've done with your students what can teachers be doing now to make sure that they're raising up children that are seeing the world and the way that it should be seen and treating people the way that they want to be treated i don't know whether i've said this before but what teachers have to do is teach the three r's of rights respect and responsibility and race isn't one of those ours we have to teach them instead of teaching the three hours of reading writing arithmetic only one of which begins with r which is reading we have to teach the three r's of right rights respect and responsibility in every child in that classroom and every teacher has to be willing to respect the rights of every person in that classroom and those kids have to respect the rights of the teachers of the janitorial staff of the secretary of the administrators and every every one of their of their fellow students we have to teach the truth we have to get the book nile valley contributions to civilization and put up pictures of that out of that book on the walls of the classroom so the kids know that we all came from the same place we have to do that so that children will realize that we're all members of the same race and if you get that if you get that national geographic and put these pictures on the wall and say these are all my 30th to 50th cousins because we are we are all you are one of my 30th or 50th cousins now if you don't want to be if you don't want me for a cousin that's tough you're stuck with me because that's the way it is we all came from the same source people and we have to get that into our kids heads we have to stop teaching the kind of social studies that says only white males did the discovering and the inventing and the creating a whole lot of people other than white males made this world as valuable as it is and we all came from the same place countries in africa every single one of us these kids have to know that they have to see skin color as something to be admired and to be appreciated and to be enjoyed rather than something to be seen as a negative you have to teach your children who are going to be who are i'm sure melanacious they're going to do children with lots of melanin in their skin they are so lucky because they'll live longer than those little white children will because they have protection from the cells the dangerous cells rays of the sun that i think we have to realize that you're in a in a position that nobody can replicate you have something that i'll never have and i my grandchildren will never have and it makes me angry because i i realized that had we lived our white lives differently skin color didn't have to be a problem it wasn't until the spanish inquisition then it became a problem it never should have been a problem this has to stop and if you tell if you tell teachers who are talking about all these different races if you have a student who comes home from school and says the teacher stood up in front of the class today mom and said when i see people i don't see people as black or brown or red or yellow i just see people as people if your child comes home and says that you need to go to the school and save the teacher you made a racist statement the first moment my child was in your classroom because my child wants to know whether you see white and every student should be prepared to say that's a racist statement when they hear one and when somebody walks up to you and says when i see you i don't see you black has anybody ever said that to you yes yes and what did you say and what did you say i i think it was sent to me when i was like 13 or 14 and i don't think i knew what to say at that time oh yeah well you have to know what to say you have to say to them what linda guillory did she she's the one who hired me to work for us west and someone and i was standing there when this happened this woman this fully foolish person and she was wearing heels this high so i knew she wasn't bright but she came up like this on her high heels and she came up and said to linda gillery black aggressive linda guillory she said linda when i see you i don't see you black and i thought oh there's going to be bloodshed here i've got to wear this suit tomorrow i backed up and linda guillory said i think you have a severe eye problem let's make an appointment with the optometrist so we can get your eyes fixed that woman didn't say thank you very much linda she got away just as fast as she could and i looked at linda i said that was beautiful and she said well what would you say so now when somebody says to me and they do it all the time because they want me to appreciate them they'll say to me i don't see color i'm color blind and it's always a liberal white female and i say i knew you were colorblind before you said it because if you weren't colorblind you wouldn't wear that shirt with those pants and then they say how dare you you don't understand what i meant i said i understand exactly what you meant what you mean is you can't relate to someone unless their skin is the same color as yours so you're just going to pretend that the largest organ on their body which is their skin is something that you don't see i want to know how you do that well you just don't understand oh yes i do and i'll never forget the instructor who stood up in texas in the auditor in the in the gymnasium where they were holding the meeting in this whole bunch of students and said ms elliot while i was talking don't interrupt me while i'm talking she should have known better she stood up and said i just looked for the person's heart and i looked her and i said madam if you can see my heart from where you're standing you should go down to the hospital local hospital and volunteer to be their x-ray machine you can save them a bunch of money she said you don't understand i said i understand perfectly what you just said you have to look past people's skin to their heart have you ever dressed a chicken and she said what do you mean i think she thought i meant have you ever put clothing on a chicken you wouldn't want to see my heart my heart is colorful and so are my veins and so are the rest of my organs you need to know that i don't have to take this i said that's right you don't she left and after she left i said people she just gave you a valuable lesson she exercised the freedom that people of color don't have when some white person is saying ugly things in the front of the room like i don't see color you can't you don't have the right to walk out if you want to pass the course you have to sit there and nod and smile you know you do and i know you do until we all have the freedom that she just exercised nobody should have that freedom if you aren't freedom to leave when the nastiness starts she shouldn't be freedom free to leave but you see she has rights that people of color don't have she's white so she's right so she can do whatever it whatever trips her trigger i suspect that after that she thought twice before she said i just look for the person's heart it's a racist statement people jane you you've taught third graders and you taught adults what are some differences or uniqueness that you find when you try to work with adults versus third graders the way you understand adults is get a book about transactional analysis do you know anything about transactional analysis all right according to eric byrne who started this transactional analysis business and which sociologists and psychologists are now going to say it doesn't mean anything it's wrong that's what they're saying about dyslexia he says you have three ego states child parent and adult when i do the exercise i am in my parent ego state and that forces everybody in the room to be in their child ego state it works beautifully what i want for the what i want them to do is get into their adult ego stage if you haven't read the book ta for teens get it and read it on one page two pages of that book these are the statements we make when we're in our child ego state another two pages these are the statements that we make when we are in our parent ego state there's another page these are the statements we make when we're in our in our adult eagle state you get those into your head and then you listen to these politicians talk and you can tell which ego state they're in every minute of their speech it is absolutely remarkable and when you're in your child ego stage you're not going to learn anything when you're in your parent evil state you're going to try to teach everybody something when you're in your adult eagle state you are willing to learn and you're willing to teach it's a whole different thing working with adults i get the same results that i get when i work with children no child has ever hit me but adults have adults get go into their child eagle state immediately and don't even recognize what's happening to them it's fascinating to do it it's fascinating when you do it and you can watch them you can watch them grow while you're talking you can watch people go from one ego state to another while you're talking because you recognize what's going on and they don't because we don't teach people these things we teach them the three r's we forget to teach reason rights respect and responsibility if we had instruction in the classroom that taught the three r's we could virtually do away with prisons in this country there's not a doubt in my mind but what we could if we retrain re-educated not not defund but re-educate police departments we could change this situation in a year we could i think we could do away with racism in two generations if we decided to it's only been around for a little over 600 years we could give it up it's a myth that we need to give up there's the book done book called the myth of race should have been called the lie of race but the person who wrote it knew that if he wrote the lie of race he wouldn't get it published and people wouldn't read it but if he calls it the myth of race then it's more acceptable and people will read it and but once you get into it you can't put it down because it is so full of good information everybody needs to read robert walls sussman's book the myth of race it will teach and if you don't want to read the whole thing read the first chapter and the last page of the last chapter and you'll find out that this whole thing is a put up job it's only been around for about 600 years and it's time to get rid of it nobody is born a bigot nobody is born a bigot nobody is born a racist you have to be taught to be a bigot and you have to be taught to be a racist and you know what happens when you teach people bigotry because you're on the receiving end of it unless i'm very much mistaken so in over 55 years of doing this work um i'm not i'm not sure if you would say that we've made progress um and you've touched on hope as well as i look at my children i hope that i can instill in them some of these core ideas these lessons that they can take with themselves into the world and make the world a slightly better place with the promise of two generations from now maybe being in a better place have you seen progress do you still have hope i watched what happened the day after george floyd was dead was killed i watched people of all colors all ages all stages all genders all sexual orientations all religions go in the street and protest what had to happen to that man unfortunately i heard people who were describing it say people of all races are out here and i wanted to choke every one of them that said that but you can't do that through the to the screen it's a good thing but they did say people of all kinds are out here protesting this that tells me that a difference is being made that tells me that young people are not going to put up with this young people know that their lives are being constricted by the by the lie of race think of the enjoyment we could have with one another if we didn't have to back off because of skin color think about that i can't tell i couldn't tell what your religion was by looking at you but i can tell that you're male and i can tell that you probably your skin is a little darker than my own i don't know where you came from until you told me i think that if we could just look at people and accept them as they are and enjoy them as they are we could do away with a whole lot of problems in this country if we if we practice what we preach in the christian faith or in any of the other religions if we practice what we preach we could do away with this in islam it says to kill a person it is as if you had killed the whole world to kill one person is as if you have killed the whole world because it says that you think you have the power to decide who has the right to live or die now that kind of statement is found in practically every religion unless i'm very much mistaken and maybe we could just live listen to another religion in china they say there's a saying is if you're planning for a year grow crops if you're planning for a decade plant trees if you're planning for a lifetime educate the people that's what we need to do we need to stop indoctrinating students and start educating the people leading them out of the ignorance of racism do you know how much money we could save if we could stop putting black males in prison do you know how much money it costs to keep a black male in prison for a lifetime because of bill clinton's three strikes you're out do you know how many people went into prison because of the possession of marijuana and now they are making it legal in most of the states in the united states and those men have got to be let out of prison you think they're going to be the same as they were when they went in we have to think about the future before we do things in the present that will damage us in the future and that's one of the main problems for pale faces when people of color get into a new situation they look native americans look six years six generations into the future before they make a decision we pale faces look 15 minutes into the future before we make a decision and we make a lot of bad decisions because of that could we change that absolutely how would we do that education lead people out of ignorance instead of teaching them how to be good american citizens and that's another thing if you have the time the word america people america is not the 48 contiguous states alaska hawaii and the islands off the southeastern coast of the united states america is everything from the northernmost point of canada to the southernmost point of south america all those people in all those countries all those citizens are americans it's time for us to start calling this country the united states of america because the most important word in that title is united the question that keeps going through my head is how are you the person you are today like what were you like as a child were you i was i was a brat as a child i was a brat as a child i was i was the middle child and my mother would tell us oh when we had company every time we had company she'd say somebody say three girls and two boys yes i didn't want a girl when she jane was born but i got a girl so i let my husband i had ganny namer and my dad made me mabel after his older son who sister whom my mother hated and she yeah let me tell you and my older brother named me jane because he was reading in the scott sportsman jane bill dick and jane reading series so here i am mabel jane the person that my mother every time we had company i finally got to the age where i'd go outside when she started her stick so i wouldn't have to hear those folks saying oh isn't that clever it wasn't clever i found out i knew at an early age that i was one of the weirdos i was the weirdo in my family and there's no doubt about it so i grew up being a weirdo and thinking about things from a different point of view i think about things from the point of view of being the other i know how the other feels i felt that for 87 years not 87 my mother died several years ago i'm not supposed to be joyous about that however however i never wanted to get even with her but i wanted her to learn better and i think that's what people of color want out of us pale faces i don't think you want to get even i think you want to get equity and i think we want people of color want what everybody else in this country wants which is equality which is respect which is acceptance and which you know the things that were promised in the constitution i think we all want it do is that am i describing what you want does that make does that make you weird no no no you see that's what we have to realize and it doesn't make you weird to want what everybody else wants what is it taken for granted by people who are melanemic we melanemic people know what we want and it's perfectly logical for us to want those things but when a melanacious or melonic person wants the same things we see that as out of the ordinary it's not out of the ordinary it is absolutely acceptable and expected and ought to be it ought to be realized we ought to force that to happen in this country and we could if we lived up to our so-called beliefs but we don't we live down to we live down to a society in which making money is the main thing and in which we realize we fully realize that racism is a profitable enterprise if you can keep black males in a prison doing the things that producing products that would cost a lot more money to be produced as they are sent overseas or into the community then you can keep prisons and and you can we can have lots of prisons we can have that forever because we have a real cheap labor force there get the book the system by robert reich read the book the system by robert reich oh it's under this end of this thing here okay the system by robert reich get this book and read it and you'll find out who made the rules in this country why they are made the way they are and who's who is in charge and you'll find out that it's the members of the business roundtable if you don't know anything about the business roundtable read robert rice's book the system and when you get done reading that you will say to yourself this has to stop and it has to stop now this is a problem we could solve if we chose to you have to remember that the japanese bombed the bomb pearl harbor and i was i remember when that happened i remember when my dad came out of the filling station and said those japanese just bombed pearl harbor i didn't know what pearl harbor was and i didn't know what a japanese person was but for for for from 1941 to 1945 we fought the japanese and the germans and then we made peace and then we put those countries back together within three years we put those countries back together after that horrendous war we know that adolf hitler caused the killing of 10 million human beings but we put germany back together after the war we could bring us all together if we chose to we could we franklin roosevelt before the war started somebody said to him what are you going to do about hitler he said leave that man alone he's taking care of a problem the rest of us don't want to deal with then he decided to deal with it after we were invaded and after the japanese bombed pearl harbor we could have dealt with that sooner we didn't we didn't have to see 10 million human beings killed in order to make one man feel good about himself we could we could have stopped that we chose not to because we were in a depression and mr roosevelt wanted a way to get us out of the depression what's the best way to get out of depression have a war and that's what we did we didn't have to do that we didn't have to let 10 million people die we didn't have to in the late 1800s allow the robber barons to suck up all the money in this country but we did and we're doing it again right now when you have when you have one percent of the population making more per minute than most of us make in a lifetime that's called reinstating the robber barons but as this man says in this book as timothy snyder says so well if young people do not begin to make history politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it and to make history young americans will have to know some this is not the end but a beginning young americans have to know some history in order to make it better in the future and i think they're i think they're coming along and i think they will i think the future of civilization is in the hands of the young i will say that's probably a better job of educating them go on that's probably one of been one of the biggest insights for me is um i'm actually did my first degree in mathematics and engineering and then moved on to psychology so i've never been directly exposed to history but in the past few years as i've been reflecting on the injustices that i've witnessed increasingly i've realized the important critical role of understanding the history that goes into these conversations and more than anything it's i'd say that's probably one thing i would echo is just taking the time to fully understand the history that feeds into these experiences in these systems those have those who've forgotten the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them i don't remember who said it but whoever said it is absolutely right those who've forgotten the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them and that's what we're doing if we knew history wouldn't have let this whole thing happen i know that some of the books that you've referred to me in our past conversations i've taken to heart i've read i fully intend on sharing some of the books that you've mentioned in our conversation today i also know that you're humbled to a fault that you have this incredible website jane elliott.com where you have resources where you have activities where you have a bibliography of books that people can go and and self-reference so that they can educate themselves and with your permission we'd love to share those to our our networks our channels um i wish i had the energy that you have it seems as as though it's endless i know it's tiring the work that you do but i want to thank you for that work i know that you again to a fault you're humble and you don't like to take much credit but i will give you some credit in the growth that i personally have experienced and in the belief that i have that sharing more of these conversations and engaging in this difficult reflection can have an impact to a scale that is potentially meaningful i know it'll impact the way i continue to talk to my children um i'm i don't want to speak with for jason or talia but um i i can't thank you enough for the work that you've done in the time that you so have so generously shared with us today um jason talia any other thoughts there uh i just want to echo those comments jane definitely appreciate the time and kindness that you've shared with us and all the knowledge what's in uh equally as powerful is the work you've done through your career uh but wait a minute you have to realize that practically everything i know i've learned from people who look like you because people that look like me don't know these things and from my father who said you know the tweet difference between right and wrong i'll do the right thing god damn it now he didn't use the right language but he said the right thing and if we would just do the right thing and if we would listen to people look like you we could do the right thing but instead we looked at we listen to people who look like me who don't know what they're talking about make no mistake about that i appreciate the humility but uh i would have to echo amidst words uh we definitely appreciate the commitment it has made the world a better place much appreciated yeah thank you i i appreciate you everything that they've said but i appreciate you as a strong strong woman and a strong strong mother and a strong example um and the words that you said especially like i think about my family on a personal level to be able to instill the things that i've learned but the things that you've said into my kids that means a lot for me don't ever let your children be in a classroom where the teacher doesn't see color don't ever let a teacher say that to your children or around your children and if it happens you go straight to the teacher and then go to the principal you have to do you have to do it right but you go to the principal you give the teacher a chance to make it up and if that doesn't happen you go to the principal and you go you keep it up until that situation is changed your taxes are paying those teachers to teach your children the truth not the lie yeah you have the right to demand the truth and if they can't teach if they don't know the truth then you get them the book the myth of race and say to them i expect you to read this and after you read this i expect you to read nile valley contributions to civilization and after you read this i know and listen and if they still don't get it i'm going to play them this video and say miss jane elliott said hey no don't don't claim this bitty don't play this video get the video a cast um the eye of the storm okay get the video the eye of the storm take it to the school and say i expect this film to be shown in every classroom third through eighth grade okay this year because having students i watched my father watched that film wish he had learned that when he was nine years old you have the right you have the responsibility to see to it that those teachers and those children learn what my father didn't learn until he was 59 years old and you have the opportunity right now to make that happen i challenge you to make that happen absolutely okay and if they don't do it give me a call yes ma'am tell them tell them if they don't do it that you have invited me to visit their school yes give them a little conversation and they will buy that film by the dozens to keep me out of their environment yes ma'am jane i've heard from a little birdie that um at one point you had a copy of the birthday earth book but that maybe you don't have that anymore i don't know if that's still the case i had three copies and they walked away would you would would you please accept if i found the copy and had it sent to you do you have 600 that you want to pay for happily i would happily contribute to that this this moment that you've shared with me is easily worth that to me no no if you get a copy of that book you read it okay and then you and then you go to the publisher and say we want this book republished as it was because this book is what told several presidents how to treat our people our citizens of color this book was instrumental in the wall on the southern border of the united states and creating that and in the destruction of the planned parenthood clinics you need to know that that man had a lot of power even though he died but maybe five years ago he had a lot of power while he lived and that his books are still out there and i want a copy of that book but i don't want you to pay six hundred dollars for it i would hey i'd love to have a copy of that book but maybe we could just put put out the word that elliot wants her books back yeah maybe well we'll share this as widely as we can and maybe that'll do the trick worst case scenario you have multiple copies i want to be mindful of your time you've been so gracious jane multiple times and jumping on a call with me through all the work that you continue to do um again i can't thank you enough but with that maybe we'll we'll let you get back to your beautiful day no wait a minute you have to realize something it is a tremendous compliment to me to have young people care about what i'm saying particularly particularly since i'm an old white woman to have people of color willing to listen to me is a tremendous compliment and an honor all in itself whether or not i should take it that way that's the way i take it because most of you know things i'll never learn about racism because you've lived with it you know it and i know it and every person of color involved in this knows it and you're very patient with us i'm grateful for your patience and forbearance but don't let it go on too long there are some things we must not tolerate elie wiesel said you must not tolerate the intolerable if something is intolerable for another person it should be intolerable for you and that's that's what i believe it's time to stop doing the things that are intolerable for from a third to a half almost to reforce the population the united states but in 30 years it'll be three-fourths of the population in the united states who have been treated in an intolerable way we have to stop it i agree all right thank you very much thank you so much thank you so much no no thank you thank you thank you for a lifetime of being allowed not to have to worry about being treated unfairly because of the color of my skin for the love of god [Music] thank you i'll see you again have a great day thank you all right goodbye

Channel: Omid Fotuhi

Views: 129,683

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Id: m2U1TB4-X3U

Length: 82min 9sec (4929 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021