You and three of your kindergarten classmates are sitting on the floor, playing with blocks, while the teacher helps another student with her work. All the kids on the floor start throwing blocks at one another and you join in — but when the teacher notices, you’re the only one who gets blamed.
And there’s one other difference: The other children have white skin; yours is black.
This is a scene from “1000 Cut Journey,” an upcoming virtual reality experience aimed at showing non-black people what it’s like to be African-American. It was co-developed by a team at Columbia University, led by Assistant Professor Courtney Cogburn, and one at Stanford University, led by Professor Jeremy Bailenson.
“It was important to Courtney, the idea is that these types of events happen to you every day, all throughout your life,” Bailenson said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “It doesn’t happen once. These microagressions happen when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, when you’re an adult.”
