The Sneetches

This is adapted from some lessons I found for elementary school students, but The Sneetches can be used to scaffold the concept of racial privilege and discrimination based on differences or perceived differences. The Sneetches is a lesser-known Dr. Seuss tale where these Big Bird-looking creatures called Sneetches (who live on beaches because of course they do) live in a segregated society where privilege is given to the star-bellied Sneetches and those that have none are excluded from fire pits, weenie roasts, and are completely ignored by the favored Sneetches. Needless to say this makes the starless Sneetches depressed so they sit all day moping trying to figure out what to do about this inequality. What happens after that is complete chaos since a stranger comes into town and (for a modest fee) offers to give the starless Sneetches what they've always wanted. See the above link to watch a video of the whole story, but the conclusion is that the Sneetches eventually learn the valuable lesson that it doesn't matter at all what their appearances are since they're all Sneetches. 

On Teaching Tolerance.org there is the initial activity which is like a modified version of the Jane Elliot blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment which is highly problematic because if the goal is to guarantee a random assortment of groupings. It makes much more sense and it's not ethically questionable to do as this lesson plan says and have them count off and give them stars. By having students compose a list of class privileges that the stars are allowed to benefit from, it gives students a chance to consider the things that they value and creates an exciting generative environment. After that I would want the students to each experience the dual benefits and consequences of each group. If you wanted to, you could give the students a couple of days to struggle and succeed. Let's say that the starred are allowed to have pencils with erasers but the starless are only allowed pens so they can't afford to make any mistakes while writing or their work will be messy. How frustrating would that be? You'd definitely hear a lot of feedback about that. 

After whatever allotment of time seems appropriate inhabiting each role, the students can then either in class or for homework complete a custom Google Form which allows the teacher to create a survey from scratch. Some of the questions could be multiple choice and others would be more long form questions describing what they were feeling as both the dominant and the subordinate groups. Then when you come back together as a class, you can ask, "What was this really about?" and make connections between the Sneetches and systematic oppression based on physical traits. 

When using this technological solution, the students have a degree of anonymity and the teacher is able to collect and display data as long as it doesn't breech that anonymity to prove a point about what the students have taken away from the activity. Students then can keep a log of Sneetch-like behaviors they observe or relevant current events that are examples of exclusionary and racist actions. Given how the Sneetch exercise impacted them emotionally and practically, students can then strive to keep their school environment Sneetch free and monitor the problematic behaviors they witness. 

In the Sneetches 2 political cartoon pictured, the star-bellied Sneetches are pictured in red and blue varieties that have been pummeled by the opposition. This is very obviously supposed to represent Republican and Democratic feuding and how destructive party politics can be. The non-partisan Sneetches are calling themselves problem solvers and looking very smug as they pat themselves on the back since they have remained out of the skirmish. They ironically labeled themselves as having no labels and I think that is a very important lesson in mindfulness. It's foolish to say that differences don't matter in a world that they so clearly do, but there are things that can be done about to adjust for those differences to create a stable and thoughtful classroom space.