Mrs. Elliott’s Class
In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a schoolteacher named Mrs. Eliott constructed a social experiment with her third-grade students to teach the value of his work by making the emotional toll of discrimination more tangible. The experiment involved singling out students according to eye color and subsequently discriminating against brown eyes one day and blue eyes the next. The author uses imagery to describe how just the re-enact of this experiment for a later documentary produced equitable emotional responses:
“Even in the reenactment, the emotion on the faces of the brown-eyed students on that first day was upsetting. You knew this exercise wouldn’t be repeated much. The students were humiliated; they huddled together on the playground, coat collars turned up to hide their faces from the documentary’s camera. They said almost nothing in class and barely spoke all day. The blue-eyed students, meanwhile, were relaxed, happy, unself-conscious participants in class.”
John Henryism
The imagery of the legendary folk tale of John Henry is engaged to illustrate a very real medical condition. The story of John Henry is about an almost preternaturally strong man whose is driving railroad spikes who can do the job faster than anyone and ultimately challenged to beat a newfangled steam-driven spike-driving machine. After a long and brutal contest, John Henry actually does win the contest, but at the cost of his life. The imagery described here is co-opted to describe a condition called John Henryism which is best explained in sociological terms relative to the book as driving underprivileged black men to respond to the stress of discrimination in ways that cause potentially damaging physical overexertion.
“Southwest Airlines First Class”
The author introduces an imagery-significant anecdote shared by an African-American couple and their repeated experiences flying Southwest Airlines. The story revolves around their desire, when running late to catch a first-come, first-served flight, that a darkly-pigmented black man has taken a seat toward the front of the plane because, their experience confirms, this will in the seats adjacent to him still be vacant when they arrive, thus assuring that even if they are running very late, they can still wrangle more desirable seating. The point being that the image of the lone, very dark black male is enough by itself to ensure seating is available not otherwise would not be because of white fear.
Winners and Losers
The Seattle SuperSonics of the late 1970’s become a valuable tool for revealing the potential for creating explanations to fit a predetermined conclusion. The very same players who opened the 1978 season with a 5-17 record remained intact all the way through the seventh game of the NBA Finals that season which they lost by just six points. And yet the conclusions drawn the available evidence manifested in their talents and abilities—which had not altered—were remarkably different at the first of the season compared to the end of it:
Start of Season: The point guard could pass okay, but couldn’t drive to the basket. The strong forward shot from too far out and missed easy rebounds under the basket. The center had too little mobility and couldn’t get midrange shots.
End of Season: The point guard’s poor driving ability became a testament to his brilliance as a floor general; the strong forward’s lack of rebounding was a minor cost of his beautiful outside shot; and the center’s immobility made him a rock of stability under the basket.
