Don't mind the title of this post. I just have this thing about titles. I hate having to put one up before I start. So there you go. Often I don't know what I am going to write until I get into it. I guess I had just better write the post and then invent the title hey! Will do that next time.
Just watched a version of Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes on TV. It's a lesson on discrimination - racial - but it applies to any sort of discrimination. Jane Elliott divides a group of average people into blue eyed ppl and brown eyed ppl and then makes the rules that the blue eyes are the ones who will be the inferior and the brown the superior. She then devises all sorts of ways to have the blue eyes humiliated, segregated, made to wait, given inferior food, given tests that have been devised so that they will fail and so on. The Brown eyes are treated well and with respect. The Brown eyes play the game. Of course generally white people have blue eyes and black people have brown eyes. There are some that don't fit ie white with brown eyes but the blue/brown thing stands. I watch the blue eyes protest and roar and cry and leave the group cos they don't like how they are treated. They deny the whole situation and deny the subtlety of discrimination. They call Jane and the Brown eyes bullies. They are so confronted by their experience of unfair discrimination that they deny that such treatment exists.
It is astonishing and at the same time very believable as I see abloids deny that disability discrimination is rife or deny my experience of it. eg "they didn't mean it". Or as people have said to me "that's not patronising!" when they have just patronised me horrendously. They don't seem to understand that the patroniser or the discriminator don't get the say about whether it is or isn't. The person who is on the receiving end decides whether they have been patronised or not. It's hilarious to think anything else.
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