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Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.

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Stored Sun: What a Book Actually Is

Ask ten readers what a book is and you will get ten metaphors and no definitions. A mirror, they say, or a door, or a passageway with footfalls behind it. The metaphors flatter the reader and obscure the object. None of them tell you what is sitting on your shelf, dark and patient, while you sleep. Here is the answer. A book is stored sun.

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The Canny and the Dead Canary

We live in perilous times. Those sworn to protect us, betray us. Those set apart to foment dissent are too frightened to stand against the tide for fear of drowning; and so all the rest of us are left to perish, withering in the plains, dissolving along the plattes — but never resuscitating in the pinnacles — and so we are forever, longingly, tripping into the pits of the Uncanny Valley.

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Forcing Troll Empathy with Civil Rights Captchas

If you manage, or publish, any sort of online community, you are fully aware of the Arrogant Comment Trolls, who come into your home and poop all over the furniture because they feel is their blessed right to tell you how to think and what to do and they love trying to cut you down in your own forum.

Finding ways to press empathy into those emotional anonymous trolls is an ongoing wonderment, and the Civil Rights Defenders website created a unique way to make venomous commenters reconsider their purpose in posting their vile bile on your website by creating the “Empathy Captcha:”

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How Reading Creates Empathy

We read to experience what we do not know.  We write to share what we think we understand.  Learning and sharing constructs leads to literacy and thus begins the formative memes of a shared, and cogent, morality.

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