Remember the blue-eye/brown-eye racial experiment that aired on Oprah years ago? It’s famous. Groups get divided into blue-eyed group and brown-eyed group and they are then treated differently based on eye-color. I was reminded of it when a friend emailed me the link to ABC Primetime’s Muslim woman-in-store experiment.
A few words on why these “race experiments” irritate me.
Biggest offense? Devolving race into one big, elaborate socially conscious Punk’ed episode we can safely forget. These “experiments” claim to have the following objectives, whether they accomplish any of them is highly dubious. One, they aim to show you how minorities are treated in America (they don’t). Two, they try to point out where racism comes from (being treated like shit?). Three, they try to show the racist in You (spare me).
But what they overwhelmingly do accomplish is entrap white people into saying racist things that they might/ or might not say normally. To which you might say, so what? I’d even agree. If you are willing to engage in blatant racism with total strangers, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing that your blurred face is shown on national television as an American one should be ashamed of. But. My problem is not the plight of racist, white people. My problem is that these experiments dum down complex and always contradictory realities of immigrants and people of color into sound-bite friendly melodramas. Racism is a real problem, but reducing it to a 1950s docudrama doesn’t help us understand it or each other any better.
I’d also like to add, that I especially hated the two girls in the end (~4:20 mark: one white and the other a Muslim woman in western clothes). On the one hand, hooray blah-blah for them. Stand up against the racist cashier (and cry about it later, lorrdd)… that’s good. On the other hand, hellooo… my Muslim sisters are perfectly capable of demanding to see the manager themselves, thank you. They barely let her talk during their entire tirade against the cashier. Want to talk about racism? Let’s discuss feminist pity for the bur-qua veiled woman. It reminds me of Laila Lalami’s excellent article, The Missionary Position, that I blogged about here .
Pah.
