Jane Elliot Internationally Recognized Educator & Anti-Racism Advocate

Nigel Beckles Interview with Jane Elliot

Abridged Transcript

Welcome back to my In Conversation Podcast Series. My special guest for this episode is the pioneering Educator, Lecturer Diversity Trainer and Anti-Racism Advocate. Jane Elliott.

Nigel Beckles: Hi, Jane. Welcome to my podcast series. Very nice to have you here. In fact, it's a privilege. So how are you?

Jane Elliott: Well, I'm about average, I guess I'm in good shape. Since, since the last week in January, I've been absolutely fine. We got rid of a big problem. The last week in January, when we got a new president, when we finally got a president we've gone for four years without one, and now we have one and it's a real relief to hear someone talking in simple but proper English and using the right words at the right time. And who has developed an adult ego state for four years, we had somebody who had, was a case of arrested development. He had never developed an adult ego state. So he always spoke either like a child or like a parent. I never heard him say anything out of the adult ego state. And that's what caused our whole problems in the last four years.

Nigel Beckles: So where do you live at the moment?

Jane Elliott: I live in California in the winter time and I live in Iowa in the summertime, spring, summer, fall in Iowa, which is perfect, California, which is wonderful. And how long have you lived in California? I live here for, I've only been back here this year for a month, but I'll be here, be here until the middle of May.

Nigel Beckles: Where did you grow up?

Jane Elliott: Well, I grew older in Iowa. I grew up when I left there. Well, if you stay in the town in which you were born long enough, you will not be inclined to grow up nor encouraged to grow up. You will be inclined to stay as everyone else is, and don't be foolish and get out of, get out of your place, stay in your place and realize what it is that isn't, doesn't tend to make you grow up. It lets you grow older, but it doesn't let you grow up. I grew up after I left my home in Riceville, Iowa, and moved out into other places in Iowa. And then when I started doing lectures all over the place, I grew up a whole lot.

Nigel Beckles: Well, you mentioned growing up, what was your childhood like?

Jane Elliott: I was the middle of seven children. And we're all raised on a farm mother was a casual Catholic. My father was a believing Baptist, so we had the constant war, religious war in our house, but it never got to that point. It was simply, we didn't go to church until we were old enough to know what we wanted to do. And then we joined the Methodist church, the Fort the three at four of us. And sang in the church choir. And that's the only thing that's, that's the extent of our, our religious education. And it was quite good because everybody else in the choir was over 50 and a couple of them were over 70. So we learned an immense amount in the Methodist church choir about how to be. A fully functioning human being. It was absolutely the best thing that could have happened to for adolescents who are on fool's Hill and we're on our way up. We could have gone falling off, but no, those, those older people in that choir kept us centred and kept us sensible. We lived up to their inspections instead of down to the expectations of our peers. It was really the best thing that could possibly have happened to us.

Nigel Beckles: When did you become interested in becoming an anti-racism activist and an educator regarding racism?

Jane Elliott: My husband was running a national tea food store in the North end of Waterloo, Iowa, which was the Black section. And he had one black employee national tea would let him have more than one black employee and that employee quit and went to college. And the leader of the local NACP came in and said, we're going to Darryl, we're going to pick at your store. He said, why are you going to pick up the store? She said, you don't have any bike. He said, get me a Black employee. I want a black employee. You know, they won't let me have more than one. She said, no, we don't want to pick at your store. So she picketed the store and that was the first store picketed in Waterloo, Iowa during the civil rights movement, as a result of that national tea got even with them, they closed the store and they moved it. To another location. Well, in the meantime, they had transferred my husband to another community and we were going to have to rent our house.

We put our house up for rent, somebody called and said, do you rent to Coloureds? And I remember as if it happened yesterday and I'm ashamed to say it. And I said, this is an all-White neighbourhood. And I knew when I did it, I had done exactly what I had sworn I would never do. I knew I had defected to the enemy. I was just so embarrassed and so ashamed. And she said, okay, thank you. And hung up. And that's the point at which I decided I will never go along with racism again, I will never be a party to that kind of behavior again, and I never have, and not being a part of that kind of behavior, not going along has cost us friends and relatives and family. A lot of misery and my parents that we need never have had if I just hadn't had that experience. But I had that experience and you can't. I didn't become an activist. I just became absolutely unwilling to go along with what I knew was wrong and judging people by the amount of melanin in their skin is flat out wrong. It is so ignorant that there was no way I can go along with it. There's absolutely no way I can. I can, uh, cooperate with that kind of thing. Well, we're in February, 2021. And I last week I was reading about a Louisiana cemetery who apologized for refusing to bury a local black police officer. And then in the United States, the, uh, civil rights at night at 1964, they banned discrimination and ended the so-called Jim Crow laws part.

Nigel Beckles: I wanted to ask you, what do you believe causes racists and racism?

Jane Elliott: Ignorance. Pure unadulterated ignorance. And for the most part its self-imposed ignorance. The information is out there. You could go and read and find it and find out where you're wrong and what's wrong with this situation and change their behaviors and change the behaviors of those around you. The racism in the United States of America and all over the world is a money-maker. Think of the amount of money you would have had to spend to raise that cotton in the early days of this country, if it hadn't been for black slaves, think of the amount of money you would have had to spend to buy the land that we stole from what we call Native Americans. When in fact those people came from Africa to think of the amount of money we could have, we would have had to spend if we had treated people fairly all these years. We don't have to, and we still aren't and you can write laws until hell freezes over it. But if you don't, if you don't make sure that those laws, we have to make sure people follow those laws and obey those laws. And if we don't, then the laws aren't worth the paper they're written on. But interestingly enough, in this country, Laws are written because of the ignorance of the writers. The people who write the laws to segregate cities and counties and counties and States are people who don't know any better. They really believe that there are several different races and they really believe that people want to wait only with those who are like themselves. They really believe that there's such a thing as white people and they believe there's such a thing as black people. Human beings do not come in. Those two colors, White and Black.

They come in shades of Brown and people need to educate themselves and realize that the Black Lives Matter movement is a marvelous movement, except that it's based on the same faulty premise that White supremacy is called the premise that there's more than one race and that there are black people and white people there aren't. You can look at me and see that my hair is white. My shirt's white and my skin is not. I can look at you and see that your glasses are black, but your skin is not. You and I are members of the same race. There's only one race on the face of the earth. It's the human race. And we are all members of that race. And so as every other human being on the face of the earth, you and I have the same ancestors back there and then evolved between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. And you and I are 30th to 50th cousins. Now, whether you like it or not, that's the way it is. And people have to get used to that and have to accept that and have to appreciate that.

And have to realize how brilliant those first people, highly melanated people were, who came from the area of the equator and managed over thousands of years to populate every landmass on the face of the earth. They did that without any modern technology. And the only reason there are people who call themselves White. The only reason my skin is this color is because we moved farther and farther. Our ancestors moved farther and farther from the equator. Our bodies produce less and less melanin because we're exposed to less and less sunlight. People need to realize that if they would trace their DNA back far enough, they would find that a percentage of their DNA came from a country in Africa. It's time to get over this nonsense. Black lives matter because we all have black in our background. Get over it. It's just this, the whole thing is so, 13th century, I don't know a single person living today who would be willing to go back to the 14th century where transportation and communication are concerned. But they want to use the language of the 14th and 15th century in the 21st century. It makes no sense. It is totally ridiculous. In my opinion, the racism is created by ignorance. Do you think a white supremacy mind-set can be creative? You know, of course it can. And we have proof of it in this country today because we'd had four years of having a fool repeat over and over and over and over the lie of several different races. We had a fool in this country who convinced people. He said, I'm not a racist. And then pointed at someone in his group and said, ‘I've got my black person right over there..’ and pointed at the only so-called Black person in the room. And she was delighted. I thought, Oh my God, leave the room. She should have left the room. She should have said; ‘I'm not yours.’ You need to know that.

I'm five one that doesn't make me very tall. If you want to deal with unreality, if you want to play word games, I can play those word games we learned there in the last four years that you can appeal. To the most ugly inclinations of people and get their approval as long as you sound enough, like them as you possibly can, as long as you build a wall to keep those Brown skin people out along the Southern border of the United States because Brown skin. And he said, because Brown skin people reproduced too rapidly. What that said to me was; The man knows the demographics of this country. He knows that within 30 years so-called White people will be a numerical minority in the United States of America. And he's going to try to keep that from happening. He can't keep that from happening. You can't do it. It isn't going to happen. We are going to become a numerical minority because, and here's one of the reasons as the hole in the ozone layer gets larger and larger and more and more sunlight is allowed to enter our environment. Hit the skins of those of us who don't have much melanin, more and more of us are going to die of melanoma and skin cancer. So we're going to have fewer and fewer pale faces. You need to realize that that's the way it is. He said, we're going to build a wall along the Southern border of the United States. We keep those people who aren't Americans out of America. What he doesn't realize is that America is not the 48 contiguous States, Alaska Hawaii, and the islands off the Southern coast of the United States.

America is everything from the Northern most point of Canada to the Southern most point of South America. Every one of those citizen of any of those countries is an American. You can't build a wall to keep out American schools. What was our Americans? You'll see, this is our problem. The problem in this country is indoctrination in place of education. And that's what we have. Indoctrinated students. I know, because I've taught them or I've taught against the standard elementary curriculum. I did that for years because if you use the standard elementary curriculum, you all teaching Racism. Sexism, Ageism, Homophobia and Ethnocentrism. That's what our education is about because that's the way the people who wrote those, those correct that curriculum, those curricular in the thirties, twenties, thirties, forties, that's what they believed. And that's what they wrote. And we're still using some of that ridiculous. Anti-social studies. We need to change the system. We're going to have, we're going to have to re-educate the educators in order to change the way education is done in this country.

Nigel Beckles: Well, you mentioned demographics in the United States and I was observing the assault on Capitol Hill. A few weeks ago. And I noticed there were demonstrations of Confederate flag waving. So do you think the assault on Capitol Hill was motivated in part by racism and a fear of a shrinking Caucasian demographic in the USA?

Jane Elliott: Of course it was when you say the assault on Washington, on the Capitol. My first thought is a lot of salt, no pepper. There were not many people of color. That was an assault, but, you know, let me make something perfectly clear here. George Floyd's killing was absolutely horrendous for him, for his family members. But it was a good thing for this country, because for the first time it made White people see what Racism is. People see the video all the time and they couldn't deny that it was happening because there it was right there in front of their faces over and over and over for three weeks. They played that tape. Now some people thought they were playing that tape to show how awful it was. I think they were playing that tape to tell young Black males what will happen to them if they get out of line. They should have said we are not going to repeat showing this over and over, because what does that say to young Black boys? And what does it say to their mothers? I'll never forget the mother who stood up beside me on the stage at a very special group of, of, uh, college university department heads. Last thing I asked was. Your color gives you power. And she paused for a long, long, the, and before it, before that I'd asked all these questions of her and the White male. So the White male, his answer was yeah, he's got power of height and gender and color, weight and height, gender age, and skin color. And she had power in none of those areas. And when I asked her, does your color give you power? She paused for a long, long moment. And then she said, ‘I'm going to say something I've never said out loud before.’ I'm ashamed of it. She said I have two children. Both of them are girls, both times when I was pregnant. I prayed that I wouldn't have a boy. I said, and that's because, and by now there was one tear slowly making its way down that beautiful blackface.

She said, because they didn't want to think about what he'd have to go through and what I'd have to go through when I lost him. Now think about that. Here is this brilliant black Beautiful woman, very dark skin. Brilliant. And  had listened to this man say that his height gave him power. His age gave him power. His gender gave him power. His skin color gave him power. When I asked him if his skin color gave him power, he said, I never have to think about it. He never has to think about it. She had to think about every moment of it while she was pregnant, because she didn't want to have a child, a son because of the way he would be treated and what she would have to do when she was for the love of God. Tell me. That we don't have racism in this country. Tell me that all those department heads who are sitting there after she made that statement and crying, tell me that they didn't need to learn that they needed to learn that. And we needed to watch George Floyd being killed by that cop in order to realize. That we'd been living in a fool's paradise. Now we're having to face the truth. And I was so proud when all of those young people came out in droves to protest what had happened. The only bad part about that was the people who were describing it. The network people said, people of all races are out there. I thought, when are we going to learn? Weren't people of all races out on the street? There were people of lots of different color groups, but only one race. We've got to get over the idea of several different races. There's only one. And that's the human race.

Nigel Beckles: Speaking about that. I want to ask you about your famous blue eyes, Brown eyes exercise.

Jane Elliott: It’s an experience that helps you to develop empathy. I didn't create that exercise. I learned it from Adolf Hitler. I was born the year Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt came to power in their respective countries, 1933. And from 1933 to 1945, I listened to my father absolutely infuriated by what he was hearing on the radio and seeing on the newsreels about what Adolf Hitler was doing. The day I was going to do that exercise. That was our assignment for the day. It wasn't in the center of the elementary curriculum, but that was the assignment. And the Sioux Indian prayer said, Oh, Great Spirit, Keep me from ever judging a man until I've walked a mile in his mouth. I decided that if my students didn't understand what we were talking about when we talked about Martin Luther King, Jr. and why he had to be killed. I would allow them to walk in the shoes of a child of color in my classroom for a day. And I decided I would do what Hitler did. And I would base my judgment of those students on the color of their eyes. Just as Hitler did during the Holocaust. One of the ways you got thrown into the gas chamber or shot was by having the wrong color eyes.

So that day I did what Hitler did. I did it on a very, very small scale, but four years ago, At the beginning of Trump time, I realized immediately that Mr. Trump was replicating the blue eyes, Brown eyed exercise, and therefore ideas of the Holocaust on the national level in this country. The very things that he did were the very things that Adolph Hitler did, and the very things that I did in a tiny, tiny way. I couldn't believe it. I thought good Lord. I'm seeing the blue eyed Brown eyed exercise at the national level what's going on here. And then I read the book. When at Times the Mob is Swayed’ by Burt Neuborne. Everybody should read it because you'll find out in that book, that in Donald Trump's bedside table, in a locked drawer, he had a book, The New World Order by Adolf Hitler and the things that he was doing, procedures that he thought were right. In governing, he got from Adolf Hitler. Think about that. And then think about the other leaders in the world who have been following his lead for the last four years. One person can make a difference. One exercise can make a difference. One idea, somebody has said, no power on earth can stop a man with a dream or an idea whose time has come. Martin Luther King Jr. Had a dream. His dream is more alive now than it was when he was living the idea of one race. One race of people on the face of the earth is an idea whose time has come and no power on earth is going to be able to stop it. Once people realize that we have been misled, we have been mis-educated.

We have been lied to long enough now, 500 years of this nonsense as long enough, it's time to put a stop to it. When did you think about conducting the blue eyed Brown died exercise. I thought about it the year before, and I didn't do it, but then Martin Luther King Jr. Was killed. And then I had no choice. I had, I could not allow my students to be as ignorant as their parents and their teachers were couldn't do it. Didn't have the right. I'm I'm an educator. An educator is one who is engaged in the act of leading people out of ignorance. And you can't lead people out of ignorance if you allow, if you agree to allow people to be separated into White and Black. Because those two words are polar opposites quite as the color of goodness and purity. Black is the color of savagery and evil. Why in the name of all this? We are still using those two words there misnomers in the first place and they are tremendously judgmental and causes more problems than we need to have in the second place. Why would you do that to a child? Why would you say to a child you're White? So you're good. Nothing we can do about that. We have little boys, black so-called black boys in this country who have been dying, trying to bleach their skin with highlights or Clorox or something so that they don't have to be Black. For the love of heaven. How long will we let this go on? How long are we going to be this ignorant? Because it's pure unadulterated ignorance. If I can learn this it is open to anybody else, what I do is create a microcosm of society in a classroom, a boardroom, a lecture hall, or around my family's kitchen table.

Nigel Beckles: You've appeared in several TV, documentaries, and you've also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show at least five times. How did you become involved with being a guest on Oprah's show?

Jane Elliott: Somebody found out about me and he was a, he was a person who tries to book people on different TV shows and he booked me on Oprah and I thought I was going to go in and we were going to discuss racism. And instead she said, well, what can we do? And I said, well, I'll tell you what we can do. And we separated the group according to eye color. I was really, really interesting. I thought. I made a difference there. We really accomplished something there. And then I went to her first year anniversary party and realized that some of the questions that were asked during that exercise on the Oprah show were asked by paid audience members. That's what they do for a living television shows. They asked the scripted questions. Hold on this isn’t so good. But I did the Oprah show five times and I finally realized that this isn't what I want to do. We aren't making any progress here. We're using a lot of words and we're using a lot of time and we're causing exactly the wrong reaction. So the next time, sixth time one of her people called and I said, you call somebody else. Because I don't do circuses and they were turning it into a circus and I don't do a circus. I may look like the fat lady in the circus. I may look like that sort of person on the surface, but I am not here to furnish entertainment for people who don't have anything else to do in the morning from 10 to 11 or whatever, except sit there and be entertained. I'm not an entertainer. So I turned it down.

Nigel Beckles: What was the effect of being on our show after your first guest appearance? Were you recognized in public more?

Jane Elliott: Yeah, but not in a positive way. The first show I did was the Johnny Carson show and I got so many ugly, ugly letters from that show. I couldn’t show them to my students. I showed the good ones to my students. But 30% of them were so ugly and so threatening. I've been, you know, I've been threatened with all kinds of death. They took me out of union town, Pennsylvania at midnight one night because the teachers that I put through the exercise in a very informal way called the superintendent in the afternoon and said, get that bitch out of town. We're going to shoot her. And I worked all day in union town the next day. But with practically an armed escort with me all the time the following day. They said, we're getting you out of town tonight. And they took me to the Pennsylvania turnpike, three car loads of black students so that it wouldn't get shot in Union Town, Pennsylvania. It's been very interesting. It's been a real lesson. If you put your head above the parapet, somebody will try to shoot it off. So you have a choice. You can just stay low, maintain a low profile and not make any difference and just accept things as they are. I don't think that's what we're put on earth to accept things as they are.

Nigel Beckles: So are you still a full-time diversity educator?

Jane Elliott: I used to travel a lot, but now I'm doing everything virtually like this one from June until November. I did two or three of these sometimes a day. And six or seven, eight or 10 a week virtual speeches. But then I started saying something that really makes people crazy. There are no White people and there are no Black people. And the millennials are really angry about that because as one of them said to me last week, I like my Black color. I said, fine. If you think you're Black, you're Black and I'm tall. Nevertheless, you need, you need to realize that Black is not a race. If you want to call yourself Black, you go ahead and I know why you want to do that. You want to get past being a victim fine, but don't use a word that is going to cause you more trouble in the future than you've had in the past. Because White folks who think they're White are going to do everything they can to destroy anyone they consider Black. That for some is their aim in life. Now, that's what happened on the steps of the Capitol building. The three weeks ago, they were attempting to destroy an idea. You can't destroy the idea of one race. They were attempting to destroy the idea that you can say ugly things as a president of the United States, and continue to be president. People need to realize that our people of color, and melanocytic people are the ones who took Mr. Trump down. They are the ones who swung that election for Biden. And that is driving these so-called Proud Boys absolutely insane. Well, they were insane to start with, nobody who is a man calls himself, a Proud Boy. You spend years trying to get past boyhood, and then you'll get a big gun and you put on some camouflage clothes and go out and pretend you're a man. When he said to the Proud Boys ‘Stand down, but standby’ I thought, Oh my God, what, what is the matter with this man's head? And I know what's the matter with his head. He's a boy and he's proud of it.

Nigel Beckles: Well, I have read about the gerrymandering going on in certain US States in terms of the voting system. And even now they're still trying to suppress the vote and trying to introduce different rules. Like. Two forms of ideal, maybe three forms of ID before people can vote in those States. But going back to your Diversity Training, I know you have trained in many large corporations in America. How do you measure the effectiveness of your work?

Jane Elliott: The corporations in which I've done the exercise have to this day said it changed the way we operate this. It made our people of color and our women appreciate this corporation. They will work harder for this corporation because we have proven to them that we are willing to spend the money and take the chance to have this woman work here. That is great. Well, during the inauguration, only one person who spoke, who gave a speech during the inauguration, used the phrase, many races. I think that's progress. I think that says somebody has told them we've got to stop using the word races. We've got to start using the word human beings or the word fellow human beings. We've got to stop referring to the different races. Cause there's only one. Now it's taken 53 years to get that message out there, but that's not bad. It's taken us over 500 years even to allow people to think about it. Suddenly. Now we're going to, you're going to see something really interesting as the old hole in the ozone layer gets larger and as melanin becomes more and more valuable in your skin, you're going to see more and more people of different color groups. Mating and reproducing, which is just absolutely, as far as I'm concerned, delightful, because they always have until the 14, 15 hundreds, it wasn't until those days that it was wrong. Race, wasn't a problem. Color wasn't a problem. People were just different human beings, different nationalities, different cultures, different colors, different genders, different orientations. And we had laws against miscegenation, people of different races. There's only one race. I think you're going to see such a difference. In the next 30 years people of different colored groups are going to be reproducing like flies because we pale faces are going to want our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren to survive. Who will help us to have children with polar. Now this, I know what some of your listeners will think, they will go crazy because they have been indoctrinated with the myth of several different races and the idea that people of different color groups. See, the whole thing is, so it is so immature, so ignorant, so unbelievably ridiculous.

Nigel Beckles: You received an honorary degree in 2019. What was that for?

Jane Elliott: Well, I've received two. I received two in two years. I think it was because. They couldn't find another logical person to give it to, really think it was an act of desperation both times. See, my name is out there. My face is out there. My shirt is out there on which it says, ‘Prejudices and emotional commitment to ignorance’ is out there. And when I walk through airports, if I wear this shirt is like, Oh my God, she's here. It's has been a blessing and a curse. It's been very interesting.

Nigel Beckles: The honorary degree that you received was doctor of humane letters by CSU Bakersfield.

Jane Elliott: I got one just like that from the University of Northern Ireland the year previous to that one. I'm delighted with both of them because it says this: The University was willing to recognize somebody who did something that is totally unacceptable as far as 40 to 50% of the population of the United States feels. And they were willing, both of them were willing to say, this is something that is valuable, that this person did. That's a wonderful, that's a wonderful compliment, but isn't it absolutely weird that 53 years ago, I did that exercise. It took half a century for somebody to say, this really works. And the man who did the Black and White Dallas studies, Kenneth Clark, the psychologist said in the introduction to a book that Bill Peters wrote about the exercise. The Blue eyed Brown eyed exercise could be the answer to our educational problems into our racist problems, because it teaches children to empathize with those who are different from themselves. That is the finest statement that has ever been made about the exercise as far as I'm concerned. And that man knew what he was talking about.

Nigel Beckles: Well, I believe sincerely that any, and all recognition that you received for your work is very richly deserved. So Jane, what are your plans for the future?

Jane Elliott: To stay alive. Well, I think now it's all in our plans, especially with the current COVID situation. Yeah. And I'm being very careful about that. No, my plan for the future is to hope that I don't ever have to do this work again. And when Barack Obama became president, I thought now I don't have to do this anymore. It's going to get better. That things are going to get better. And I wasn't planning on the 40% of the population of the United States that needs to believe in the rightness of Whiteness. And I didn't realize that they would go underground and simply get together and plan ways to keep Barack Obama from being successful. To elect people who would corrupt cooperating with him, keep him from being successful. Right after Barack Obama was out of office they elected someone who bases his political philosophy on the writings of Adolf Hitler. And the problem is young people don't know the difference, but people my age, remember what that was like. We're dying off. The good part about the attack on Washington, January 6th is a whole lot of young people are going to remember how that looked and how those fools looked and how cowardly they behave and how absolutely unacceptable their behaviors were chants were vicious. How they were carrying the Confederate flag into the Capitol building, the Capitol of the United States of America. They're going to remember that for the rest of their lives. And when somebody comes up, another Trumper comes up and starts his trumpeting. They're going to say, ‘Oh, back the truck up here. We’ve been here before. I recognize this and we're not going to let it happen again.’ And it will happen again because who was, it said, ‘Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them’  but they have by their idiocy put in the minds and the memories of a lot of Americans, United States of American citizens, a memory that they will carry with them. And the next time this begins to start, they will say, ‘No, we've been here before. We're stopping you now.’

Nigel Beckles: So Jane, how can people contact you?

Jane Elliott: I'm on jane@janeelliott.com. And when you go there, download all the printed learning materials. The first is a set of typical statements of White folks make that think they aren't racist. The second is the clarification little statements, how those feel who are on the receiving end of them. The third is a set of commitments to combat racism, 18 things you can do in your own environment to change your own racism. And we all have aspects of racism in our characters because we've been taught it from birth. The fourth is a bibliography, download the bibliography and read every book on race on that bibliography. And then when you get done with that, you'll have the answers to all of these questions, but the situation is you will have to self-educate yourself and give up self-imposed ignorance. And that's what it takes to end racism. Ending ignorance. And you can't do that by going to school. Thy have done studies in this country that proved that the longer you stay in school, the more bigoted you become, because the longer you're in school, the longer you are reinforced in what you learned except in math and science, but particularly in social studies was part of the indoctrination. It had nothing to do with reality. It had to do with a tale we tell in order to keep one group on top and the other group where they belong, in their place.

Nigel Beckles: Thank you very much for your time Jane. Very much appreciated.