An interesting, thought-provoking Lithuanian PSA video by Lithuanian anti-discrimination organisation Svetima Geda has been doing the rounds and is very quickly going viral on the internet. The aforementioned video, which is mostly in English with the Lithuanian translation on the subtitles, is a social experiment that highlights and challenges attitudes towards racism in Lithuania and the modern day world of social media.

The video which is 5 minutes and 30 seconds long starts with a sped up time-lapse of the experimenters wiring the actor up, setting the cameras up and arranging the ‘set’ which largely resembles a waiting area for a job interview or something similar in a big corporate building where the candid experiment is carried out.

The plot of this candid social experiment starts with an actor playing an African immigrant new to Lithuania, who is sitting in a waiting area when a variety of unsuspecting Lithuanian locals including men, women and even a child from all walks of life, join him in the waiting area each at separate times.

The video depicts a montage of each time the African man and each of the locals exchange pleasantries and small talk then silence as they wait until the African man then asks each of the locals to translate a message in Lithuanian which he received on Facebook and cannot understand. He explains he is new to the language and someone has sent him a message on Facebook which maybe the locals could help him translate. The video cuts to each of the locals mostly happy to help and some politely agreeing with a smile, but once the locals read the message their faces immediately change.

The interesting part is how the Lithuanian locals react once they read the message. Some take a long pause and are visibly distressed by the message they have just read, some shake their heads whilst most refuse to even say back what they have read. It is clear to see all the locals are shocked and appalled by the message and have great difficulty to even tell the African man what the message entails. One woman describes it as “humiliating” and a man responds after being asked “nope, there is no useful information here” whilst another local man pronounces that he cannot say what has been written while looking at the African man.

What is striking is that the men all decline to interpret the message whilst majority of the women emotionally recite back the message to the African man whereas the child innocently interprets without any thought. All of the unsuspecting locals apologise to the African man with a look of guilt and remorse as if they have written the message themselves.

This is the purpose of the video that no matter whom these people are and what their beliefs are when confronted face-to-face with racism there really is no good that can come out of it and how anyone reacts to it is largely the same, there is simply no place for it in today’s world.

How would you deal with this situation? Would you be honest? Would you refuse? Would you lie? On the flip side how would you react if you were the African man hearing these things?