BESC1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Melanin
25 May 2018
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Prejudice and Discrimination
Prejudice – an unjustifiable (and usually negative) attitude towards a group and its members.
Prejudice generally involves stereotyped beliefs, negative feelings, and a predisposition to
discriminatory action
Stereotype – a generalised (sometimes accurate but often overgeneralised) belief about a group
of people
Discrimination – unjustifiable negative behaviour toward a group and its members
Prejudice
❖ Meas prejudgeet
❖ Unjustifiable and usually negative attitude toward a group – often a different cultural, ethnic, or
gender group
❖ Like all attitudes, prejudice is a three-part mixture of:
▪ Beliefs (in this case, called stereotypes) – generalised belief about a group of people
▪ Emotion (e.g. hostility and fear)
▪ Predisposition to action (to discriminate)
• Stereotypes can also be bias behaviour. To believe that obese people are gluttonous, and to
feel dislike for an obese person, is to be prejudiced; prejudice is a negative attitude. To pass
over all the obese people on a dating site, or to reject an obese person as a potential job
candidate, is to discriminate; discrimination is a negative behaviour.
Jae Elliot’s Faous Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed experiment
In the 1960s, America was a country divided. The black civil rights movement had swept across
the country, and as more and more African Americans fought for equality, many racists fought
against them.
In the midst of this movement, Jane Elliott, a white teacher from a mostly white town in Iowa,
watched as the world around her battled on the streets of cities like Atlanta, Chicago and
Washington D.C. She, too, wanted to be involved in gaining equality for all men and women,
regardless of race. But how?
And then, one night in April 1968, a shot rang out in Memphis, Tennessee. As Jane Elliott
watched the media coverage of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she felt appalled
by the way the white reporters could not seem to understand what the black community was
going through.
Elliott realized that the problem was the disconnect between what whites knew about racism
and what blacks experienced. So, Elliott developed an exercise to change the way her white
students thought about racism.
The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise
One morning after King's assassination, Elliott informed her class that they were going to
change the way things were done. Blue-eyed children were given pride of place in the
classroom. They were given extra recess time, a second helping of food at lunch, and they were
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