The Event: How Racist Are You? (2009)

Uploaders note: I saw this when it was broadcast and recently watched it again after speaking to a friend about it and getting hold of it. Highly recommended, and made me take a step back, even as a lad who's been through the UK care system, and look at myself and the way I view things.

I highly appreciate what Jane Elliott does, and it clearly doesn't get her liked by a fair few people. We should admit such speaking up takes guts, whether we agree with her conclusions or not.

Are we all more racist than we realise or would like to admit?

For this Channel 4 documentary Jane Elliott, a controversial former schoolteacher from Ohio, is recreating the shocking exercise she used forty years ago to teach her nine-year-old pupils about prejudice.

Elliott is asking thirty adult British volunteers - men and women of different ages and backgrounds - to experience inequality based on their eye colour to show how susceptible we can all be to bigotry, and what it feels like to be on the other side of arbitrary discrimination.

Does Elliott's exercise still have something to teach us four decades on and in a different country? Presented by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, the exercise is observed throughout by two expert psychologists, Prof Dominic Abrams and Dr Funké Baffour, who will be unpicking the behaviour on display.

e wrote:

Last Night's Television: The Event: How Racist Are You?, Channel 4

Jane Elliott calls herself "the Bitch" but, like most people who self-define (“I'm mad, me”), she doesn't really live up to her claims.

Hard lesson: in The Event: How Racist Are You?, Jane Elliott, a former teacher from Ohio, attempted to show how susceptible people are to bigotry

Frosty, yes. Bitch? Nah. In fact, she's spent the best part of her life trying to make people nicer – well, less racist, which is certainly nicer, in one way at least – starting in 1960s America, and now here, in a warehouse in modern-day Britain.

The Event: How Racist Are You? is the latest instalment in Channel 4's Race: Science's Last Taboo season. Elliott had asked for a group of volunteers willing to take part in a "psychological experiment". As soon as they arrived, she divided them up by eye colour: one group blue, one brown. The brown eyes, a mix of various ethnicities, she treated with a certain level of chilly respect. The blues, she sneered at, and sent off to be contained in a dark room for two hours. While they're left to pace their cramped room, she took the "browns" through the reasoning behind her experiment – the same one, more or less, which she has been doing around the world for the past 40 years. The only way to eradicate racism, she argued, was by teaching "white folk" what it feels like to be black.

It's more than a little simplistic, if not for 1960s America then at least for modern-day Britain, where racism assumes a far more varied and multilayered form than simple white-versus-black equations suggest. Immediately, the candidates started to throw up their various objections. One woman claimed that she didn't want to be a part of "putting other people down", several others walked out. In the other room, the kerfuffle is being watched by Krishnan Guru-Murthy and a pair of psychologists, who noted that the fuss is coming exclusively from the group's white members. They had a point. Are the protesters failing to understand, as Elliott appears to suggested, their own latent racism? It's tricky. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it's certainly interesting.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-t...

==================================================
Website - http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-event-how-racist-are-you/episode-...
IMDB Entry - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1543260/
Wiki Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott
The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment - http://www.janeelliott.com/
Streaming Version - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=396F5D3231262C2C
==================================================

Enjoy Con|Cen.

------------:File Details:------------

File Name : the.event.how.racist.are.you.ws.pdtv.xvid-ftp.avi
File Size : 349 Mb.

[Movie]
Valid : Yes [AVI]
Duration : 00:47:27
Movie complete : Yes

[Video]
Resolution : 640x352
Codec : XviD MPEG-4 codec
FPS : 25.00
BitRate : 935 Kbps
Quality Factor : 0.17 b/px

[Audio]
Codec : MPEG 1 or 2 Audio Layer 3 (MP3)
Number of channels : 2
Sample Rate : 48000 Hz
BitRate : 94 Kbps

------------:~~~~~~~~~~~~:------------