State-Sponsored Discrimination!

by zhx

I was reading online about some racially-motivated assault, and I was trying to imagine the feeling of having to live with the understanding that some people dislike you just because you exist. You know, trying to imagine I’m not a 20-something white American male from a middle-class family; humanity’s most generic creation. My empathy experiment didn’t get very far, because, short of the one time I went to a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, I’ve never really felt displaced. So yeah, I have a very limited world view, but I did remember this exercise my third or fourth grade teacher organized, and looking back on it, it’s kinda funny.

We were learning about discrimination, and to demonstrate, the class was split into left and right-handed kids. Left-handed kids would be second-class citizens for the day. Unfortunately, the left-handed kids in the classroom consisted of me and maybe one or two other students (anybody that was in that class with me… which is probably just Ray, I think it was me and Kevin Phung). We had to wear an arm band or some sort of other identifier, and we had to be last in line at lunch, we were the last to be allowed to go to recess, etc etc. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I was, what, eight years old? I wasn’t traumatized, but that’s kinda fucked up. The funny thing is, the experiment was never reversed! The left-handed kids were just shit on for a day and that was that. By the end of the day, everybody had learned a valuable lesson: It pays to be a part of the majority, and god help you if you’re not.