The Myth of Human Division

The Story of Red and Blonde

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.

Once upon a time, a red-haired person and a blonde-haired person walked into a bar.

They had never seen one another’s hair color before.

They looked.
They blinked.
They sat apart.

After a while, the blonde-haired person stood up and carried a drink across the room.

“Is your hair always that color?” they asked.

The red-haired person laughed. “Yes. Is yours?”

They compared childhood stories. They both hated cold mornings. They both liked loud music. They both missed people they loved.

Before long, neither could quite remember why the hair had seemed important at all.

Then the door burst open.

Several red-haired people entered together. They stopped when they saw the blonde-haired stranger.

The room quieted.

“Who’s that?” someone asked.

The blonde-haired person felt the air shift. The red-haired person felt eyes on them.

“This is our place,” another said.

No one had ever said that before.

The blonde-haired person stood, nodded politely, and left.

The red-haired person remained seated.

“Why were you talking to them?” the group asked.

“I don’t know,” the red-haired person said. “They seemed like me.”

The group frowned.

In the days that followed, the story was retold.

At first, it was light.

“Imagine! A blonde-haired person in here!”

But retelling sharpens edges.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Different.”

“Unfamiliar.”

Soon someone said, “We’ve always had red hair here.”

Another replied, “Yes. Our parents did too.”

“Our grandparents.”

“And their grandparents.”

It felt comforting to say.

The more they said it, the more it felt like something solid. Something old. Something shared.

“What if we lose that?” someone asked quietly.

No one answered. But the question lingered.

So they began to gather more often. They celebrated red hair. They told stories of endurance. They spoke of how long they had been this way.

No one meant harm.

They simply began to protect what they had named.

The blonde-haired person told their own story.

“I was in there,” they said. “And suddenly I wasn’t welcome.”

Others nodded. Some had felt similar glances elsewhere.

They began to meet as well.

“We should look out for each other,” someone suggested.

It sounded reasonable.

And so two circles formed in a town that had once had none.

Years passed.

Children were born into red-haired families and blonde-haired families.

They were told stories.

Red-haired children learned they came from a long, proud line.

Blonde-haired children learned to be careful.

The circles grew thicker.

When jobs opened, red-haired managers hired people they trusted. People who felt familiar. People who understood the traditions.

They did not call it preference.

They called it comfort.

Blonde-haired applicants waited longer.

When houses were sold, red-haired families sold to neighbors who felt “like home.”

They did not call it exclusion.

They called it continuity.

Blonde-haired families moved to the edge of town.

Over time, the red-haired side had better schools. Better roads. Better pay.

No one remembered when the lines had been drawn.

They only saw the numbers.

Red-haired incomes were higher.
Blonde-haired incarceration was higher.
Red-haired life spans were longer.

Each group pointed at the statistics.

“See?” said some red-haired voices. “There must be something different about us.”

“See?” said some blonde-haired voices. “We’ve been held back.”

Both were right about the outcomes.

Both were wrong about the cause.

One afternoon, long after the first drink in the bar, the original red-haired and blonde-haired person met again.

They were older now.

The town had changed.

The numbers were printed in newspapers. The words “inequality” and “heritage” were spoken loudly.

They sat on a bench.

“I still don’t think hair means anything,” the blonde-haired person said.

“It doesn’t,” the red-haired person replied.

They watched children playing in the distance — red and blonde, laughing together before someone called them back to their side of the field.

“It’s the story that grew around it,” the red-haired person added.

They both nodded.

Because the pay gaps were real.
The prison sentences were real.
The shortened lives were real.

But the hair was not the cause.

It never had been.

The story had come first.

The fear had come first.

The circles had come first.

And once the circles hardened, the numbers followed.

Generation after generation, the effects made the difference look natural.

As if it had always been there.

As if it had always meant something.

And so the town continued dividing itself over hair.

Over something no one had chosen.

Over something that had once meant nothing at all.

The Moral

When we build stories around small differences,
the stories grow larger than the differences themselves.

And once those stories shape our institutions,
their consequences begin to look like proof.

But proof of what?

Not of difference —
only of the story we refused to stop telling.

The hardest thing to see is this:

The inequality may be real.
The suffering may be real.
The numbers may be real.

But the division was never natural.

It was learned.

And what is learned can be unlearned —
if we are brave enough
to put the circles down.

*

In 1968, after the death of MLK, a small-town schoolteacher decided to conduct an experiment that would become one of the most discussed demonstrations of prejudice ever performed in a classroom. Her name was Jane Elliott, and she taught third grade in Riceville, Iowa. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. had left her students confused and upset. They had heard adults speak about discrimination, but they did not understand how it worked. Elliott chose not to explain it in abstract terms. Instead, she decided to let them experience it.

She divided her class by eye color.

On the first day, she told the blue-eyed children that they were superior. They were described as smarter, cleaner, more responsible, and more trustworthy. The brown-eyed children were told the opposite. They were said to be slower, less disciplined, and more prone to trouble. To make the distinction visible, the “inferior” group was required to wear collars so they could be easily identified. They were given fewer privileges, corrected more harshly, and subtly monitored.

Nothing else changed. The same children sat in the same seats with the same teacher in the same classroom. Their intelligence had not shifted overnight. Their families had not changed. Their abilities were identical to what they had been the day before.

Yet within hours, the classroom transformed.

The blue-eyed children, newly labeled superior, began to act more confident and assertive. Some interrupted more frequently. Others corrected their classmates. A few became openly dismissive. The brown-eyed children grew quieter. Their posture changed. They hesitated when answering questions. When Elliott gave a timed academic task the class had previously handled well, the brown-eyed group performed significantly worse. Their confidence had dropped, and with it, their results.

The following day, Elliott reversed the roles. Brown-eyed students were declared superior; blue-eyed students were inferior. Once again, behavior shifted rapidly. Those who had felt diminished became energized and outspoken. Those who had felt elevated grew uncertain and subdued. The emotional and academic patterns followed the assigned hierarchy, not any inherent trait.

What made the experiment so powerful was its simplicity. Eye color carries no meaningful difference in intelligence, character, or ability. It is a neutral biological trait. Yet when authority attached moral value to it and structured privileges around it, the trait became socially significant. Children internalized the label quickly. Expectations changed. Treatment changed. Performance changed.

The hierarchy created outcomes, and the outcomes appeared to confirm the hierarchy.

This feedback loop is the heart of the experiment’s lasting relevance. When one group is told it is superior and given structural advantages, members of that group often become more confident and perform better. When another group is told it is inferior and treated accordingly, members may experience anxiety, hesitation, and reduced performance. The resulting disparities can then be misinterpreted as evidence of natural difference rather than as the product of unequal treatment.

The consequences in Elliott’s classroom were immediate but temporary. In broader society, however, such dynamics can persist for generations. When social categories are reinforced through policy, education, housing, employment practices, and criminal justice systems, the disparities that emerge become measurable and enduring. Income gaps widen. Educational achievement diverges. Health outcomes separate. Incarceration rates differ.

Those disparities are real. They affect real lives. But Elliott’s experiment suggests that the presence of disparity alone does not prove inherent difference. Instead, it may reflect the long-term effects of expectation, treatment, and structural reinforcement.

Critics have raised ethical concerns about the emotional stress placed on children during the exercise, and those concerns are understandable. The experiment was uncomfortable by design. Yet its psychological insight remains striking. It demonstrated how quickly identity can harden around arbitrary distinctions when those distinctions are validated by authority and embedded in social practice.

Perhaps most unsettling is how natural the hierarchy came to feel to the children. Within a single school day, friendships strained. Students policed one another. Status differences felt justified. The label became reality, even though everyone had been the same only hours earlier.

Elliott later repeated variations of the exercise with adults, observing similar patterns. The lesson extended beyond a single classroom: human beings are highly responsive to social categorization. When we are told that a difference matters, and when institutions treat it as meaningful, we begin to live as if it is.

The experiment remains a compressed model of how broader social divisions can develop. A line is drawn. A narrative is attached. Privileges and penalties are distributed. Behaviors shift in response. Data emerges. The data is then cited as proof that the original distinction was justified.

The exercise leaves a difficult but important question behind: when we observe inequality in the world, are we witnessing intrinsic difference, or are we seeing the accumulated effects of stories that have been told — and enforced — for a very long time?

The bottom line: When a society assigns meaning to an arbitrary trait and structures power around it, the outcomes will eventually mirror the structure. Those outcomes look like evidence of natural difference, but they are often reflections of sustained expectation, access, and treatment. The inequality is real. The suffering is real. The statistics are real.

But the original group hierarchy that produced them is not.

It is critical that people understand this: the group divisions we so often believe define us are not inherent truths. They do not exist in nature as moral categories. They are stories attached to traits, and then reinforced through repetition, policy, and habit. Left unchecked, those stories begin to feel permanent. They begin to feel sacred. They begin to feel like destiny.

But they are not.

And if we forget that… if we allow group identity to take on a life of its own, detached from the arbitrary distinctions that birthed it, we risk mistaking constructed boundaries for inevitability. We risk defending abstractions as though they were survival itself. And in doing so, we will continue repeating the same cycle of division, hierarchy, and harm — not because we are doomed to it, but because we failed to question the story in the first place.

Group identity can only serve a temporary and necessary purpose when people must organize to resist active injustice. Solidarity in the face of oppression is not the problem. But when identity hardens beyond that — when it becomes permanent, essentialized, or morally elevated above our shared humanity — it inevitably begins to exclude. What begins as protection can quietly become preference. What begins as solidarity can drift into separation.

If identity is not eventually dissolved back into common human ground, it stops being medicine and starts becoming the illness.


There is only the human group. Everything else is hair color.


Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.