Reality TV game show racism away
Here is a novel (controversial?) solution that can eliminate racism and Hollywood and Theater have the tools to do it.
In 1967 a very interesting phenomenon was observed during the filming of the Planet of the Apes. The actors who were in makeup as monkeys, orangutan and gorillas started to self segregate into their “own kind” groups during lunch.
What this tells us is that people instinctively tend to aggregate into groups of their own visual likeness.
This tendency can lead people to think that one group of people is better than another which can extend to discrimination. It happens all over the world in regions that for one outside observer would think the two groups of people look identical.
There has been plenty of deep and wide research regarding this socio-psychological artifact, however, the point of this article is not about that.
Instead, we can use the phenomenon to cognitively train people to understand a factor of racism that is often overlooked — fear or misunderstanding of other people just because they look different.
An old American Indian proverb says “Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.” So why not take it even in a more literal way and do what the proverb says by walking in somebody else's’ skin.
Let’s have people, experience a being in a completely different visual appearance as part of an experiment to see and feel what it is like to be the other person, at least visually.
How should this reality show experiment be conducted?
Take a group of 50 or so people 10 of one ethnicity, 10 of another etc. They agree to become opposites using high quality makeup and will be given basic social role playing.
Each day before they go out a makeup artist will transform their look into their totally different counterpart, say a black person to be white, and white black, asian or oriental etc.
They are given community roles to play that might be completely different from what they might be doing in real life. A rich person is to be poor, and a poor person rich etc.
They live together in a Truman Show kind of set for a period of 60 days in a small artificial community and interact based on their roles.
The cameras will follow the interactions over the 60 days and we will see live what happens to them during their ordeal.
Situations will be set up where individuals will have to experience racist sentiment and differential treatment. The TV audience can witness a certain phenomena and relate and learn from the experience.
The set will be monitored by social and psychology majors and interviews with the participants will be conducted from time to time on late night talk shows.
I am willing to bet, that this kind of program will have two kinds of outcomes. The first are the volunteers. They will come away with a deep understanding on what it is like to walk in another person’s moccasins, and the TV viewers can see how looks affect people’s perceptions.
Who knows, maybe this will help to shed some light to show that there are actually no differences between people at all. It can help to mitigate the effects of unfounded fears and prejudices that have no foundation.
