A Class Divided Documentary Analysis

In the PBS documentary A Class Divided third grade teacher Jane Elliot tried an experiment to let a class of her third graders experience discrimination. For Jane Elliot’s third grade class in a small town in Iowa discrimination was unheard of because there was only white Christians living in the town. She separated her class based on eye color, so one day she made the kids with blue eyes be superior and the kids with brown eyes be inferior. She did multiple test to see if the way they were treated changed the way they learned. The next day she switched it, so the kids with blue eyes were now inferior and the kids with brown eyes were superior.

America is made up from all different types of cultures from all around the world, such as Europe, Asia, and Africa. In America Street, there is a lot of different cultures in each story. Like in The Circuit, Francisco Jiménez talks about his family sharecropping and his opportunity and conflicts with going to school. The common theme of cultural, racial or religious differences appears in Sixth Grade, The Wrong Lunch Line, and The All-American Slurp.

This simple nine word quotation from Matshona Dhliwayo summarizes much of what Jane Elliot has spent her entire career trying to get people to understand. Watching the film, The Essential Blue Eyed, gave me an entirely new perspective on racism and in truth, showed how ignorant I had been. Jane Elliot is able to give study participants and viewers a completely new perspective on the social construction of race. According to the University of Minnesota, race refers to a category of people that share physical characteristics such as facial features and skin color (UMN 1).

When you hear obesity, do you imagine malnutrition or simply an individual who “eats too much?” Well, these health threatening issues go hand and hand. Learning that a large number of obese individuals are low income, it can be concluded that a lack of funds results in cheaper, more fattening and unhealthy food purchases, which ultimately can develop into malnutrition and unsafe weight gain. The eye-opening film, A Place At The Table, provides viewers with a true representation of how the issues of hunger and malnutrition in the United States affect individuals on a daily basis. Throughout this movie, the filmmakers, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, examine the lives of three individuals who suffer from hunger and and lack of nutrition.

Fed Up is a documentary made in 2014 that is based on the issues caused by the American food industry. Fed Up, uncovers America’s true secrets about the food people consume every day. More specifically, it reveals the affect sugar has on people’s bodies. As a result, the amount of sugar in food, the bodies consent of glucose, and the satisfying taste it brings, too much sugar could cause certain sicknesses causing the body to not work the way it supposed to. To start off, the amount of sugar put in America’s food is predominately high.

I believed that Whites and Blacks were equal however there were no African Americans in my grade school classes from K through ninth grade. There is truth to the assertion that parents’, relatives’ and friends’ negative reactions to people of minority races do send mixed messages to children (Sue & Sue, 2014). I recall that occasionally my father would make negative comments regarding an individual’s ethnicity which demonstrated to me that people could be judged by others based on their ethnic

The Netflix original documentary, 13TH directed by Ava DuVernay explores the racial inequality in the United States throughout history. The documentary focuses mainly on the fact that most of the nation's prisons are unfairly filled with African Americans and colored people. The documentary educates the audience of the horrors the African Americans and colored people went through history and today beginning with slavery, to convict leasing, to Jim Crow Laws, and lastly to present mass incarceration. Ava deeply examines the economic history of slavery and Civil War racist legislation and practices that replaced it as "systems of racial control" and the present forced labor from the years after slavery was abolished. The powerful film 13TH represents

They teach anyways because that is what they do. She appeals to them by the use of logos with addressing teaching is a hard job, but not impossible. They can do it, they are educators. Born to make a difference. This encourages the educators to want to form relationships.

Imagine this: you are living in a discriminatory world full of people who do not understand you, and choose to judge you by your differences instead of getting to know you. If you are even the slightest bit different. The slightest distance from ordinary, you are judged. You do not get to fight for them to know you, because as soon as they place stereotypes on you. They decide who you are supposed to be.

In 2013, Gabriela Cowperthwaite directed the documentary Blackfish. This documentary is about Tilikum, an orca from SeaWorld that has taken the lives of many trainers. The documentary makes the claim that orcas should be freed from captivity. While in captivity they are causing harm to both themselves, humans, and the other orcas. Blackfish is a great example of an argument that can be rhetorically analyzed because it has pathos, ethos, and logos.

I was shocked that there had been no altercations prior to the experiment but the day of the experiment, the blue eyed children quickly adapted to the idea that they were better than blue eyed students. One of the students said, “I felt like a king,” and continued to state he felt he felt like he ruled the brown eyes(A Class Divided, 1968). By labeling the children and segregating them into specific groups, the

Firstly, discrimination a significant part of social psychology is the biased view and/or treatment of a particular group of people or things. In the film, an example of discrimination is when a black waitress at a restaurant does not serve two black guys. She instead chooses to serve only the white people in the restaurant. This is a form of discrimination

Jane Elliot Split her 3rd grade c lass into two different groups brown eyed group and the blue eyed group; before splitting them she asked them is being discriminating to others right and they answer the way she expected them to answer because it has been taught to them since they have been in her class, she then proceeded to ask them why was it wrong and they could not give her a clear answer she also ask them would they like to know how it feels to be discriminated against and they all said yes. She conducted this exercise for a total of two days she started the first day off letting the children know that the brown eyed students were more smarter and all around better than the blue eyed student. She then withness some of the sweetest kids turn into nasty discriminating adolescence they tease the blue eyed children every chance they could.

I watched Sound and Fury, a documentary that came out in 2000, centered on the complications of getting the Cochlear Implant, and how Deaf and hearing communities can differ upon the topic. Particularly within one family, brothers along with their wives and parents have a tough time deciding if their Deaf children should undergo such a procedure. They all travel to visit families that are hearing with children who aren’t learning ASL because they have the implant. They visit a Deaf family whose 10-year daughter is the only person in the family to get the implant. They also visit schools focusing on speech to help Deaf children who wear hearing aids and/or got the Cochlear Implant, and visit a Deaf community with a school focused on ASL.

Modern day classrooms were unheard and unseen of more than 50 years ago. If we were to travel back to the past and step foot in classrooms of that time, one theme would run throughout. More than 50 years ago, classrooms were segregated and spoke volumes about the oppression of the colored population. Before the Civil Rights Movement of 1964 and during slavery, classrooms were split up based on color and were limited resources depending on the color of their skin. (Graglia, 2014)