Continuing from Part II
ATM: A theorist named Louis Althusser wrote an essay called “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In this essay, he mentions that during a child’s youngest years they are at their most vulnerable to consume any information. He felt this was when the dominant sector of the world embedded their ideological factors in their minds because they were so young. Your Brown Eyed, Blue-Eyed exercise refuted this. It reprogrammed young kids’ minds.
JE: There was a president who said,” Give me a child from the ages of 3-5 and he’ll be mine for a lifetime.” Right after this president said this and we started early childhood education. The earlier you put it in, the longer it is willing to be with them. Children are impressionable because there has not been much input yet. From the ages of 3-10, these minds are like chalkboards waiting to be written on. What you write on children’s minds will stay with them forever.
At least this is how it has worked for the Blue Eyed, Brown Eyed exercise with third graders. They do not forget. We have proof that they do not forget. When they are 50 years old, they have not forgotten when they learned at the age of five. This is one of the reasons white people need to be aware of what they are doing to people of color on a daily basis. What you do to a child from the ages of 3-10 will affect his/her future. They will remember and act upon what they remember.
ATM: Another theorist Raymond Williams broke up society into three parts: Dominant, Residual, and Emergent. Dominant is what is enforce by people in higher-ups. Now, America is in the residual phase. Residual is the teaching of old cultural practices in modern societies. This could be consciously or unconsciously served. This explains education in our society. Yes, there are different editions and volumes, but they are repetitive material. They just put bigger words to make it look updated. Your study fits into the Emergent, which is enforcing new ideas on society. However, the dominant tries to stop it because they want to stay in control.
JE: I believe we have the wrong name with what we call education in the schools in this country. What we do in our schools is not education. Education is the act of leading people out of ignorance. Schooling in this country is indoctrination. It takes us from the age of five to the age of 18 to fully condition our citizens to submit to white superiority. We do this in every way possible in the schools in this country on a daily basis. If you do not believe it, then look at the map of the world, which we use in the classroom. The Mercator Projection Map is in practically every school in the United States of America.
2/3s of the map is used to show the countries that we consider to be civilized. The other 1/3 of the map shows the countries below the equator. These countries are predominately populated by people of color. Take a really close look at the map and you will realize how we are indoctrinating students every day using this map. This is the same map you will see behind television reporters when reading the news. Read the legend at the bottom of the map it says, “South America is actually 9 times larger than Greenland.
This is how distorted size wise the land masses on this map are. On the new Mercator maps, the projection is the same as it used to be, but now the legend is gone. You cannot find that fact on the map. This is child abuse. In this, it forces children to learn something that is not true. We use the information provided in schools to perpetuate the myths of white superiority.
We are going to have to have to stop doing in the next 30 years because white people are becoming become a numeral minority in the United States of America. You are going to see different people of power in this country; they are going to be people of different colored groups. We are going to realize there is only one race, which is the human race. Black is a color group. White is a color group. Red, yellow, brown is a color group.
The idea of the race is based on skin color began with the Spanish Inquisition. This is when people decided to skill others by judging people by the color of their skin. Human beings created racism. Anything you can create, you can destroy. I know this because I watched 9-year olds go through the Brown Eyed, Blue-Eyed exercise goes onto high school and refuse to allow their teachers to use the N-word in class. I have watched some of them become lawyers, teachers, and preachers who refuse to tolerate racism in their presence. Do not tell me racism is biological because it is not. Do not tell me it is genetic. Racism is a learned response. Some young man came up to me the night before last while I spoke at a college. He said, “Psychologists prove that we group.” Well, Psychologists prove a lot of things.
ATM: To further what you are saying about racism being learned behavior. Dr. Albert Bandura conducted the Bobo Doll Experiment. The study showed that human behavior is largely from social imitation and it is in fact not because of any genetic factors.
JE: My third graders went through the Blue Eyed, Brown Eyed exercise at Riceville School. Only a third of the students in third grade went through the exercise this year. There were only three third grade teachers and I was one of them. I did the Brown Eyed, Blue-Eyed exercise every year. After we had done it for four or five years, An associate professor from the University of Northern Iowa came and asked the Superintendent in Riceville if he could do an attitudinal survey of all the kids in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade to find out what their attitude was where race is concerned. He did the same study and survey in a nearby comparable community.
When he compiled the results, he called me and said, “This is what we have proven in this study. Your students remembered what they learned, and they are less racist in their attitude from what they learned in your class. This is measured in their survey.” I said, “This is what I wanted.” He said, Wait, there is more. All of the students in the Riceville School in 3rd-6th grade are less racist in their attitudes as measured by this survey, than are the students in the nearby community. What your students have learned has rubbed off on their peers. This is what makes this exercise extremely important. It would be difficult for someone to come in here and make racist remarks.”
ATM: Social imitation. It is ignorant for someone to say racism was learned by white folks. You are white and you are a white woman in America. You educated yourself. So, white conservatives should be able to educate themselves.
JE: This is what we have to do, especially people over the age of 15. If you can read, then you can teach yourself not to be a racist. Not only you can, but you must. I do not think black people are racist against whites. They do not have the power or numbers to act on what they are learning. Whereas, white people do. Every time I talk about the evolution of human beings and how we started out black and how we are cousins of everyone in the room –
I have people on the left and right sides of the room stick out their hand saying, “Hello cousin.” Some white liberal woman will stand and say, “What about the creation story?” I say, “I am so glad you asked.” According to the creation story, God made the first man out of the dust in the Garden of Eden.
Dust in the Garden of Eden was composed of rotted vegetation. It had to be either very very dark brown or black. The first man was black. The first woman was made out of Adam’s rib. Our bone tissue is white because it is made of calcium. Therefore, the first couple created by God was a black man and a white woman. “How you like me now?” The woman who asked the question turns red and into a woman of color immediately. The Bible says Jesus had feet of bronze and kinky, wooly hair. The bible says, “Now abideth these three things Faith, hope, and charity.” We have to change it to “Faith, hope, and love.” We chose to give love because it does not cost us anything. We chose not to be charitable. If we were, we would not have to change the Bible to fit our needs.
ATM: Althusser said, “That an individual is always-already a subject, even before he is born, is nevertheless the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all.” We are subjects. As black people and other minority groups, we are subjects.
JE: We are socialized to believe a lie.
ATM: When you are a subject anything can be put into you. You are dumbly going to believe it.
JE: If you provide justice for people, then they provide justice for you. We have a perfect example of injustice today with the sentence they handed down to Manafort. Less than 40s years for all the crimes he has committed. We are putting young black and brown men in jail for having marijuana and in their possession for 10-15 years. Let’s talk about the people who say we are in a post-racial society. We are not in a post-racial society. Racism in this society has increased greatly in the last two years. The anger and hatred of those who worship in a different way or live their sex life in a different has increased greatly in the less two years. Bigotry has become acceptable.
I was born the year Franklin D. Roosevelt became the President of the United States and Adolf Hitler became the leader of the German people. I remember from the age of eight what happens if you let someone take over your land. I remember what happens when you allow someone to divide and conquer you. We are now dividing citizens of the USA on the bases of color, gender, or religion. You can divide a country and destroy your democracy. This is happening right now.
We are allowing this man and his cohorts to destroy this democracy. We cannot allow this. We cannot afford this. This has to be stopped. My father used to say, “A man is judged by the company he keeps, and the best of company is none too good.” Look at the company that the president is keeping. We are talking about racism. This is bigotry and racism coming out of the White House.
ATM: Take me back to when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066, sending Japanese Americans into internment camps.
JE: This was a horrible mistake. In 1970, I was chosen to be a member of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In this group of 8 or 10 people, there was a Japanese- American man who was relocated because of this ugly decision. Our president in 1970 got the Japanese people out of the camps. What we did to Japanese Americans was absolutely unforgivable. It must never be repeated. I remember, not too long ago when Jesse Helms wanted tattoo numbers on people who had AIDS and put them in concentrations camps so we can be protected from them. This is how quickly we can unlearn the lessons we learned from the past. We should have learned after the 2nd World War was over, but we did not learn anything.
Here we are now with someone who says horrible things about gays and lesbians, the LGBTQ group. Horrible things about Muslims. My daughter was married to a Muslim and I have two of the most beautiful half Arab and half Anglo-American granddaughters you have ever seen in your life. Trump talks about people south of the United States border as being unfit to cross into the United States. I have a granddaughter who has adopted the most beautiful half Latino boy you have ever seen. He is only 18 months old. I can imagine what he is going to do when he is 21. I have a grandson who is marrying a gorgeous black woman. I resent having this country led by a man who has said all these ugly things about my grandchildren and all the people who are like my grandchildren.
Just yesterday at a college where I was speaking, there were three black women seated in the second row. One of them came up to me after I had finished speaking and said, I was thinking about quitting teaching until tonight. Now, I am going to keep on teaching. I am going to keep on struggling.” My responsibility is to keep doing what I can to put a stop to this. They have been fighting this battle for 55-60 years. It should have been over by now. They should be able to rest by now comfortably by now. Whoopi Goldberg said this when Barack Obama was elected, “Well, now I can put my suitcase down. I do not have to plan to move away anymore.”
Think about this. She spent all these years planning to move away because the country of her birth treats her with hatred. The three black women who taught for years were on the verge of leaving. You can’t replace their minds quickly One said, “When students come in, they do not look at me like these students look at you. I replied, Yeah, as if you are pushing your own agenda.” She said, “This is exactly what happens. I know what is going to happen, so I have to assure them
I know what I am talking about.” She should not have to assure me what she is talking about because she is a black woman. Black women keep on keeping on despite the ugly things we do to them. I do not know how they do it. They have coping skills that white women never developed. We are going to start developing them. In 30 years, white people are going to be a numeral minority in this country. White people should start thinking about what they are doing and teaching their children. They should concern themselves with the future.
ATM: Yes, I foresee this. There will come a time when the white race will be marginalized. There will be a reverse of what Whoopi Goldberg said. There will. I see it. There will come a moment when white people will say, “Well, I have to pick up my suitcase and leave.” Not all white people are racist. It is a stereotype. I love white people and America.
Look at South Africa. I mean it has been happening for some time now. The white males have come the marginalized and the minorized factor in their society. I did an interview will a South African male who was not black. He was Chinese, but because he was not black, he fit in the category. I wish you could have heard his voice. He is pleading on the phone to me about how it is not fair that white people are still getting treated like they do. He feels that they have learned their lesson and it should be equal. He fears for his life. He was not faking it; you could vividly hear it in his voice. He cannot even get a job because of his white skin color. I said in my head, “Hmm, you think. Are you kidding me?”
JE: (Laughs). They are. They are kidding you because they think that Affirmative Action was put in place to white males out of jobs and black men and women in their place. No, it was put in place because in the future there are not going to be enough males to do these jobs. Other people have to start getting ready to do these jobs now. It is in the best interest of the United States that people of all kinds are trained to do all kinds of trains. We cannot afford to have just one group doing ‘all the important’ things. It worked for a while, but it does not work anymore.
End of Part 3 or 3
