Last weekend there was a seminar about racism and right wing extremism, organized by Alternativna Kulturna Organizacija (AKO).
15 students from Novi Sad, Belgrade and Kikinda gathered to learn more about that topic. Some speeches were in Serbian, but luckily for us foreigners almost 2/3 was in English.
We heard the history of antisemitism in Serbia, watched the film "Blue Eyes" and had a discussion about it, talked about stereotypes, racism in Germany and the discrimination of Roma in Serbia.
The Film "Blue eyes" is a documentary about Jane Elliott, who wants white people to experience what foreigners in America are experiencing all day.
Thats why she makes experiments with a class or a company, where all blue-eyed people are the victims for one day(or a few hours) and the brown-eyed are superior. They have to mobb and exclude the blue-eyed people from every activity, just laugh about and not with them - treat them badly, to put it all in a nutshell.
Unfortunately, we did not see any interviews with the participants, how they felt afterwards and if they liked the experiment, just one man, who took part in the experiment when he was a kid, said, that he learned a life lesson.
But we had a lively discussion about experimenting with human beings and racism in general.
The exercise about stereotypes was about the imagination, that you have to share a compartment with a person for one week. There were about 15 choices and you had to say, who you would never travel with, and who you would like to travel with. It was a good way to show to yourself, what kind of prejudices you have. Many people for example did not want to travel with a drunk skinhead, or a smoking turk. But who says, that the smoking man will smoke in the compartment?
Afterwards you had to agree in groups of four, who accept, and who you do not.
In the speech about racism in Germany was alarming to me. There were studies for example, that proof, that 2007 59% of the citizens, they asked in Germany agree completely with the statement: "There are to many foreigners in Germany".
The next block was a film called "Belvil". It was also a documentary, but about the government in Belgrade, who knocked down a Roma-settlement without any reason and without any care for the victims. It was terrifying to see, how racism is not just personally, but also governmentally performed.
This first day was really full of information about different faces of racism and we were all curios what should be done on the second day.
Rose
Interesting links:
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/Universitaet/Einrichtungen/Pressestelle/doku...
