Blue Eyes Brown Eyes – Jane Elliott
“Keep me from judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.” This is a Sioux saying. You’ve probably heard different versions of it. This is the phrase that inspired one of the most well-known “experiments” in education. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise is now known as the inspiration for diversity training in the workplace, making Jane Elliott one of the most influential educators in recent American history.
What Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment?
In 1968, schoolteacher Jane Elliott decided to divide her classroom into students with blue eyes and students with brown eyes. The experiment, known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment, is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination.
What Was the Purpose of the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment?
The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Elliott had a talk with her students about diversity and racism. She asked her students, who were all white, whether or not they knew what it felt like to be judged by the color of their skin. Even though some of the children said yes, Elliott pushed back. She asked them if they would like to experience what it felt like to be in a person of color’s shoes. The children said yes, and the exercise began.
Why Did Jane Elliott Choose Eye Color To Divide Her Students?
The first thing that Jane Elliott did was divide the children into groups: those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. This was intentional. “One of the ways Hitler decided who went into the gas chamber was eye color,” Elliott said in a later speech. “If you had a good German name, but you had brown eyes, they threw you into the gas chamber because they thought you might be a Jewish person who was trying to pass. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, that’s the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day.”
How Did The Experiment Work?
Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. On the first day, she told the children with blue eyes they were “superior": smarter and more well-behaved than the children with brown eyes. Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. (In later versions of the exercise, children in the “inferior” group were given collars to wear.)
Throughout the day, Elliott continued to give the children with blue eyes special treatment. Blue-eyed children got five extra minutes of recess. If brown-eyed children made a mistake, Elliott would call out the mistake and attribute it to the student’s brown eyes.
The next day, Elliott reversed the roles. The brown-eyed children could take off their armbands and give them to the blue-eyed children, who were now taught that they were “inferior” to the brown-eyed children. And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before.
Results of the Experiment
It didn’t take long for the children to turn on each other. Kids “on top” would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. The kids in the “bottom” group became timider and kept to themselves. Things even got violent at recess. Within a few hours of starting the exercise, Elliott noticed big differences in the children’s behavior and how they treated each other. She noticed that student relationships had changed; even if students were friendly outside of the exercise, they treated each other with arrogance or bossiness once the “roles” were assigned.
When Elliott conducted the exercise the next year, she added something extra to collect data. She gave all of the students simple spelling and math tests two weeks before the exercise, on the days of the exercise, and after the exercise.
Elliot said that when the children were given the test on the same day that they were in the “superior” group, they tended to get the highest scores. Students in the “inferior” groups were more likely to get a worse score. If you have ever heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy , these results may not come as a surprise.
Initial Reaction to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise
Why are we still talking about this experiment over 50 years later?
The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise received national attention shortly after it ended. Elliott asked her students to write about their experiences for the local newspaper. The story was then picked up by the Associated Press. Elliott was even brought on The Tonight Show to talk about her experiences.
Not everyone appreciated Elliott’s exercise. In fact, most of the initial response was negative. Elliott’s coworkers avoided her after her appearance on The Tonight Show. They gossiped about her in the hallway. One even wrote a lipstick message with racial slurs.
Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical?
Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. One caller complained that white children would not be able to handle the exercise and would be seriously damaged by the exercise.
Researchers later concluded that there was evidence that the students became less prejudiced after the study and that it was inconclusive as to whether or not the potential harm outweighed the benefits of the exercise.
These initial criticisms didn’t stop Elliott. She continued to conduct the exercise with her third graders. In 1970, a documentary about the exercise was released. Watch it online right now ! The documentary has become a popular teaching tool among teachers, business owners, and even employees at correctional facilities.
That same year, Elliott was invited to the White House Conference on Children and Youth to conduct an exercise on adult educators.
Lasting Impact of Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment
Fourteen years later, the students featured in The Eye of the Storm reunited and discussed their experiences with Elliott. Many of them noted that when they hear prejudice and discrimination from others, they “wish they could whip out those collars” and give them the experience they had as third graders. This meeting, along with other clips of the exercise’s impact on education, is featured in a PBS documentary called A Class Divided.
Even though the response to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise was initially negative, it made Jane Elliott a leading figure in diversity training. She left teaching in the mid-80s to speak publicly about the experience and the impact of prejudice and racism.
Anti-Racism Training in the 21st Century
In 2001, Jane Elliott recorded The Angry Eye, in which she revised and updated her experiment. This time, the participants weren't a bunch of elementary school children - they were young adults. From the moment the experiment begins, Jane Elliott uses a mean tone to speak to the participants. She says it's because racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ethnocentrism are mean and nasty.
The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. In explaining the experiment rules to the brown-eyed contestants, she addresses the people of color in the room. She asks them if they have ever faced treatment like the type that blue-eyed people would experience in the following two and a half hours. One student answers, "since the day I was born." Throughout the entire experiment, Elliott leads frank conversations about race and discrimination. Sadly, these conversations are still relevant today. They were also relevant in the 1950s when Elliott first began this work.
In the documentary, she said that she conducted the original blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment to make a positive change. In 2001, she was still trying to make a change. You can contribute to that positive change by watching the documentary . It is quite powerful to watch. At points, you are likely to feel uncomfortable. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia.
Jane Elliot Quotes
Jane Elliot’s work and experiences have made her an authority on education and anti-racism. The following are some of her most insightful quotes on these issues.
On the Power of Words
“ Words are the most powerful weapon devised by humankind. We use them to divide and destroy people.”
On White Privilege
“ White people’s number one freedom , in the United States of America, is the freedom to be totally ignorant of those who are other than white. We don’t have to learn about those who are other than white. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that we’re ignorant.”
On Understanding The Different Ways We Treat Other Races
“ I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. You didn’t understand the directions. If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are in this society, stand. Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you. I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.”
On Conversations With Other Teachers
" The first reaction I get from teachers , who see this film or from hearing, - hear me discuss what I do say to me "How can you do that to these little children? How can put those little children through that exercise for a day?" And they seem unable to relate the sympathy that they're feeling for these little white children for a day to what happens to children of color in this society for a lifetime or to the fact that they are doing this to children based on skin color every day. And I'm only doing this as an exercise that every child knows is an exercise and every child knows is going to end at the end of the day."
On The Origins of Racism
“We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power."
Where Is Jane Elliott Now?
To this day, at the age of 86, Jane Elliott continues this work. She has made statements about the increase in hate crimes and racism in recent years. The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise continues to be relevant. The idea of white privilege is closely tied to Elliott’s initial question to her students. Did they know what it was like to be discriminated against?
While controversial, the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise continues to be one of the most well-known and praised learning exercises in the world of educational psychology . The students initially involved wished that everyone could participate in an exercise like this. How do you think the world would change if everyone experienced the perils and setbacks that come with prejudice and discrimination?
Related posts:
- Outgroup Bias (Definition + Examples)
- Discrimination Stimulus
- Superior and Inferior Colliculi
- Stanley Milgram (Psychologist Biography)
- Philip Zimbardo (Biography + Experiments)
Reference this article:
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- Social Psychology
Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes: The Jane Elliott Experiment
From the Classroom to the Real World
When you read about this experiment, it’s hard not to question labels. If this arbitrary division that Elliott enforced for a few hours created so many problems in this classroom, what’s happening on a larger scale? Considering all the stereotypes and prejudices that exist, what kind of damage is being done?
It’s not surprising to anyone that some social groups discriminate against others due to ethnicity, religion, or culture. These differences lead to war and hate. Even family members can turn against each other if some authority suddenly decides that those differences are a problem.
“I felt like quitting school. I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.” -A child participant in the Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes experiment-
A Question of Upbringing
Jane Elliott has done a lot of reflection about the consequences of the minimal group experiment. She says that it’s shocking how children who’re normally kind, cooperative, and friendly with each other suddenly become arrogant, discriminatory, and hostile when they belong to a “superior” group.
The hate and discrimination that we see in adults have their origin in their upbringing. Society made them believe they were better than other people for arbitrary reasons such as skin color or gender.
A second look at the blue-eyes , brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism
Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa
Disclosure statement
Stephen G. Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
University of Iowa provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.
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The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event , a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. Many educators responded by holding mandatory workshops on institutional racism and implicit bias , reforming teaching methods and lesson plans and searching for ways to amplify undersung voices.
As a journalism professor and author of a book on race that spans more than 50 years, I’ve watched these developments with great concern. We’ve been here before, with unsettling and disturbing results.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was also an event that spurred educators to action, motivating one teacher to try out a bold experiment touted to reduce racism.
The experiment took the nation by storm.
The day after King’s murder, Jane Elliott , a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. Elliott separated her all-white class of students into two groups : blue-eyed children and brown-eyed children.
On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings. They wouldn’t be allowed second helpings for lunch. They’d have to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain.
The blue-eyed children were told not to do their homework because, even if they answered all the questions, they’d probably forget to bring the assignment back to class. That’s just the way blue-eyed kids were, Elliott told the students.
On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the children’s roles.
After the local newspaper published a story on Elliott and the experiment, she was flown to New York to appear on May 31, 1968, on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, where she extolled the experiment’s effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America.
A darker side
But Elliott’s experiment had a more sinister impact. To most people, it seemed to suggest that racism could be reduced, even eliminated, by a one- or two-day exercise. It seemed to evince that all white people had to do to learn about racism was restrain themselves from an impulse to engage in made-up cruelty. They needed not acknowledge their privilege or reflect on it. They didn’t need to engage with a single Black person.
But in reality, I found in researching for my book “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” that the experiment was a sadistic exhibition of power and authority – levers controlled by Elliott. Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race.
It was about cruelty and shaming.
Subsequent research designed to gauge the efficacy of Elliott’s attempt at reducing prejudice showed that many participants were shocked by the experiment, but it did nothing to address or explain the root causes of racism .
The roots of racism – and why it continues unabated in America and other nations – are complicated and gnarled. They are steeped in centuries of economic deprivation and cultural appropriation . The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites – as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment.
Sought-after diversity trainer
Nevertheless, Elliott became as famous as a teacher could become in America.
The 1970s and 1980s were ripe for diversity education in the private and public sectors, and Elliott would try out the experiment at workshops on tens of thousands of participants, not just in the U.S. and Canada, but in Europe, the Middle East and Australia. She traveled to corporations, banks, prisons, schools and military bases.
Thousands of educators across the United States folded the experiment into their curriculums. She was a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities.
She appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” five times.
Unsettling insults
Elliott turned into America’s mother of diversity training .
The anti-racism sessions Elliott led were intense. To get her points across, Elliott hurled insults at workshop participants, particularly those who were white and had blue eyes. For many, the experiment went horribly awry.
In doing the research for my book with scores of peoples who were participants in the experiment, I reached out to Elliott. At first, she cooperated with me. But when she discovered that I was asking pointed questions of scores of her former students, as well as others subjected to the experiment, she made an about-face and said she no longer would cooperate with me. She has since refused to answer any of my inquiries.
Scores of others did participate. I interviewed Julie Pasicznyk, who had been working for US West, a giant telecommunications company in Minneapolis. She was hesitant to enroll in Elliott’s workshop but was told that if she wanted to succeed as a manager, she’d have to attend. Pasicznyk joined 75 other employees for a training session in the company’s suburban Denver headquarters in the late 1980s.
“Right off the bat, she picked me out of the room and called me ‘Barbie,’” Pasicznyk told me. “That’s how it started, and that’s how it went all day long. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.”
“Barbie” had to have a Ken, so Elliott picked from the audience a tall, handsome man and accused him of doing the same things with his female subordinates, Pasicznyk said. Elliott went after “Ken” and “Barbie” all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them, to make the point that whites make baseless judgments about Blacks all the time, Pasicznyk said.
Elliott championed the experiment as an “inoculation against racism.”
[ The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly .]
Questioning authority
The mainstream media were complicit in advancing such a simplistic narrative. They embraced the experiment’s reductive message, as well as its promised potential, thereby keeping the implausible rationale of Elliott’s crusade alive and well for decades, however flawed and racist it really was.
Perhaps because the outcome seemed so optimistic and comforting, coverage of Elliott and the experiment’s alleged curative powers cropped up everywhere. Elliott was featured on nearly every national news show in America for decades.
Elliott’s bullying rejoinder to any nonbeliever was to say that however much pain a white person felt after one or two days of made-up discrimination was nothing when compared to what Blacks endure daily.
Back when she introduced the experiment to her Iowa students more than five decades ago, at least one student had the audacity to challenge Elliott’s premise, according to those who were in the classroom at the time.
When she separated the class by eye color and announced that blue-eyed children were superior, Paul Bodensteiner objected at every turn.
“It’s not true!” he challenged.
Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Paul’s self-interest. “You should be happy! You have the right color eyes!”
But Paul, one of eight siblings and the son of a dairy farmer, didn’t buy Elliott’s mollification. “It’s not true and it’s not fair no matter what you say!” he responded.
I often think about Paul Bodensteiner. How can we teach kids to be more like him? Is it even possible today?
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Introduction
On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott’s third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their “Hero of the Month,” and they couldn’t understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.
Elliott divided her class by eye color — those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes. Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott. On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group.
What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise astonished both students and teacher. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests and other work. In contrast, the “superior” students — students who had been sweet and tolerant before the exercise — became mean-spirited and seemed to like discriminating against the “inferior” group.
“I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes,” says Elliott. She says she realized then that she had “created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom.”
Elliott repeated the exercise with her new classes in the following year. The third time, in 1970, cameras were present. Fourteen years later, FRONTLINE’s A Class Divided chronicled a mini-reunion of that 1970 third-grade class. As young adults, Elliott’s former students watch themselves on film and talk about the impact Elliott’s lesson in bigotry has had on their lives and attitudes. It is Jane Elliott’s first chance to find out how much of her lesson her students had retained.
“Nobody likes to be looked down upon. Nobody likes to be hated, teased or discriminated against,” says Verla, one of the former students.
Another, Sandra, tells Elliott: “You hear these people talking about different people and how they’d like to have them out of the country. And sometimes I just wish I had that collar in my pocket. I could whip it out and put it on and say ‘Wear this, and put yourself in their place.’ I wish they would go through what I went through, you know.”
In the last part of A Class Divided , FRONTLINE’s cameras follow Jane Elliott as she takes her exercise to employees of the Iowa prison system. During a daylong workshop in human relations she teaches the same lesson to the adults. Their reactions to the blue-eye, brown-eye exercise are similar to those of the children.
“After you do this exercise, when the debriefing starts, when the pain is over and they’re all back together, you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we preach, if we really acted that way, you could feel as good about one another as those kids feel about one another after this exercise is over. You create instant cousins,” says Elliott. “The kids said over and over, ‘We’re kind of like a family now.’ They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way and they refuse to hurt one another in that way again.”
Originally published January 2003
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Lesson of a Lifetime
Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage
Stephen G. Bloom
On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott's third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. "Hey, Mrs. Elliott," Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk.
"They shot that King yesterday. Why'd they shoot that King?" All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. "How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?" she asked the children, who were white. "It would be hard to know, wouldn't it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?"
A chorus of "Yeahs" went up, and so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. Now, almost four decades later, Elliott's experiment still matters—to the grown children with whom she experimented, to the people of Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. (She prefers the term "exercise.") It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it "evil."
That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. "They are cleaner and they are smarter."
She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person's eyes—and the smarter the person. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.
"Do blue-eyed people remember what they've been taught?" Elliott asked.
"No!" the brown-eyed kids said.
Elliott rattled off the rules for the day, saying blue-eyed kids had to use paper cups if they drank from the water fountain. "Why?" one girl asked.
"Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. Everyone looked at Mrs. Elliott. She nodded. As the morning wore on, brown-eyed kids berated their blue-eyed classmates. "Well, what do you expect from him, Mrs. Elliott," a brown-eyed student said as a blue-eyed student got an arithmetic problem wrong. "He's a bluey!"
Then, the inevitable: "Hey, Mrs. Elliott, how come you're the teacher if you've got blue eyes?" a brown-eyed boy asked. Before she could answer, another boy piped up: "If she didn't have blue eyes, she'd be the principal or the superintendent."
At lunchtime, Elliott hurried to the teachers' lounge. She described to her colleagues what she'd done, remarking how several of her slower kids with brown eyes had transformed themselves into confident leaders of the class. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. She asked the other teachers what they were doing to bring news of the King assassination into their classrooms. The answer, in a word, was nothing.
Back in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its own. A smart blue-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication tables started making mistakes. She slumped. At recess, three brown-eyed girls ganged up on her. "You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we're better than you are," one of the brownies said. The blue-eyed girl apologized.
On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy they were . Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn't want to inflict it on their former tormentors.
When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that "the people in Mrs. Elliott's room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." The next day when the tables were turned, "I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That's what it feels like when you're discriminated against."
Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder . He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." The Associated Press followed up, quoting Elliott as saying she was "dumbfounded" by the exercise's effectiveness. "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day," she was quoted as saying.
That might have been the end of it, but a month later, Elliott says, Johnny Carson called her. "Would you like to come on the show?" he asked.
Elliott flew to the NBC studio in New York City. On the "Tonight Show" Carson broke the ice by spoofing Elliott's rural roots. "I understand this is the first time you've flown?" Carson asked, grinning.
"On an airplane, it is," Elliott said to appreciative laughter from the studio audience. She chatted about the experiment, and before she knew it was whisked off the stage.
Hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliott's work appalled them. "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one said. "Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage."
Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?"
The people of riceville did not exactly welcome Elliott home from New York with a hayride. Looking back, I think part of the problem was that, like the residents of other small midwestern towns I've covered, many in Riceville felt that calling attention to oneself was poor manners, and that Elliott had shone a bright light not just on herself but on Riceville; people all over the United States would think Riceville was full of bigots. Some residents were furious.
When Elliott walked into the teachers' lounge the next Monday, several teachers got up and walked out. When she went downtown to do errands, she heard whispers. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, then a grocer, have four children, and they, too, felt a backlash. Their 12-year-old daughter, Mary, came home from school one day in tears, sobbing that her sixth-grade classmates had surrounded her in the school hallway and taunted her by saying her mother would soon be sleeping with black men. Brian, the Elliotts' oldest son, got beaten up at school, and Jane called the ringleader's
mother. "Your son got what he deserved," the woman said. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest daughter, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover."
Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. She would conduct the exercise for the nine more years she taught the third grade, and the next eight years she taught seventh and eighth graders before giving up teaching in Riceville, in 1985, largely to conduct the eye-color exercise for groups outside the school. In 1970, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. ABC broadcast a documentary about her work. She has led training sessions at General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, IBM and other corporations, and has lectured to the IRS, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Education and the Postal Service. She has spoken at more than 350 colleges and universities. She has appeared on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" five times.
The fourth of five children, Elliott was born on her family's farm in Riceville in 1933, and was delivered by her Irish-American father himself. She was 10 before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. She attended a oneroom rural schoolhouse.Today, at 72, Elliott, who has short white hair, a penetrating gaze and no-nonsense demeanor, shows no signs of slowing. She and Darald split their time between a converted schoolhouse in Osage, Iowa, a town 18 miles from Riceville, and a home near Riverside, California.
Elliott's friends and family say she's tenacious, and has always had a reformer's zeal. "She was an excellent school teacher, but she has a way about her," says 90-year-old Riceville native Patricia Bodenham, who has known Elliott since Jane was a baby. "She stirs people up."
Vision and tenacity may get results, but they don't always endear a person to her neighbors. "Mention two words—Jane Elliott—and you get a flood of emotions from people," says Jim Cross, the Riceville Recorder 's editor these days. "You can see the look on their faces. It brings up immediate anger and hatred."
When I met Elliott in 2003, she hadn't been back to Riceville in 12 years. We walked into the principal's office at RicevilleElementary School, Elliott's old haunt. The secretary on duty looked up, startled, as if she had just seen a ghost. "We want to see Room No. 10," Elliott said. It was typical of Elliott's blunt style—no "Good morning," no small talk. The secretary said the south side of the building was closed, something about waxing the hallways. "We just want to peek in," I volunteered. "We'll just be a couple of minutes."
Absolutely not. "This here is Jane Elliott," I said. "She taught in this school for 18 years." "I know who she is."
We backed out. I was stunned. Elliott was not. "They can't forget me," she said, "and because of who they are, they can't forgive me."
We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. "That you, Ms. Elliott?"
Jane shielded her eyes from the morning sun. "Malinda? Malinda Whisenhunt?"
"Ms. Elliott, how are you?"
The two hugged, and Whisenhunt had tears streaming down her cheeks. Now 45, she had been in Elliott's third grade class in 1969. "Let me look at you," Elliott said. "You know, sweetheart, you haven't changed one bit. You've still got that same sweet smile. And you'll always have it."
"I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. "It changed my life. Not a day goes by without me thinking about it, Ms. Elliott. When my grandchildren are old enough, I'd give anything if you'd try the exercise out on them. Would you? Could you?"
Tears formed in the corners of Elliott's eyes.
The corn grows so fast in northern Iowa—from seedling to seven-foot-high stalk in 12 weeks—that it crackles. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. The tallest structure in Riceville is the water tower. The nearest traffic light is 20 miles away. The Hangout Bar & Grill, the Riceville Pharmacy and ATouch of Dutch, a restaurant owned by Mennonites, line Main Street. In a grassy front yard down the block is a hand-lettered sign: "Glads for Sale, 3 for $1." Folks leave their cars unlocked, keys in the ignition. Locals say that drivers don't signal when they turn because everyone knows where everyone else is going.
Most Riceville residents seem to have an opinion of Elliott, whether or not they've met her. "It's the same thing over and over again," Cross says. "It's Riceville 30 years ago. Some people feel we can't move on when you have her out there hawking her 30-year-old experiment. It's the Jane Elliott machine."
Walt Gabelmann, 83, was Riceville's mayor for 18 years beginning in 1966. "She could get kids to do anything she wanted them to," he says of Elliott. "She got carried away by this possession she developed over human beings."
A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perhaps the only teacher who would still talk to Elliott. "I think third grade was too young for what she did. Junior high, maybe. Little children don't like uproar in the classroom. And what she did caused an uproar. Everyone's tired of her. I'm tired of hearing about her and her experiment and how everyone here is a racist. That's not true. Let's just move on."
Steve Harnack, 62, served as the elementary school principal beginning in 1977. "I don't think this community was ready for what she did," he said. "Maybe the way to sell the exercise would have been to invite the parents in, to talk about what she'd be doing. You must get the parents first."
Dean Weaver, 70, superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972 to 1979, said, "She'd just go ahead and do things. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to give a speech. That got the other teachers angry."
For years scholars have evaluated Elliott's exercise, seeking to determine if it reduces racial prejudice in participants or poses a psychological risk to them. The results are mixed. Two education professors in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, suggest that Elliott's experiment was unethical because the participants weren't informed of its real purpose beforehand. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott's diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." Kors writes that Elliott's exercise taught "blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites," adding that "in her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction." In a similar vein, Linda Seebach, a conservative columnist for the Rocky Mountain News , wrote in 2004 that Elliott was a "disgrace" and described her exercise as "sadistic," adding, "You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise."
Others have praised Elliott's exercise. In Building Moral Intelligence: The Seven Essential Virtues That Teach Kids to Do the Right Things , educational psychologist Michele Borda says it "teaches our children to counter stereotypes before they become full-fledged, lasting prejudices and to recognize that every human being has the right to be treated with respect." Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George WashingtonUniversity, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And StanfordUniversity psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo writes in his 1979 textbook, Psychology and Life , that Elliott's "remarkable" experiment tried to show "how easily prejudiced attitudes may be formed and how arbitrary and illogical they can be." Zimbardo—creator of the also controversial 1971 Stanford Prisoner Experiment, which was stopped after college student volunteers acting as "guards" humiliated students acting as "prisoners"—says Elliott's exercise is "more compelling than many done by professional psychologists."
Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her child. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. Yes, that day was tough. Yes, the children felt angry, hurt, betrayed. But they returned to a better place—unlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." As for the criticism that the exercise encourages children to distrust authority figures—the teacher lies, then recants the lies and maintains they were justified because of a greater good—she says she worked hard to rebuild her students' trust. The exercise is "an inoculation against racism," she says. "We give our children shots to inoculate them against polio and smallpox, to protect them against the realities in the future. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking."
Elliott says the role of a teacher is to enhance students' moral development. "That's what I tried to teach, and that's what drove the other teachers crazy. School ought to be about developing character, but most teachers won't touch that with a ten-foot pole."
Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. The smell of the crops and loam and topsoil and manure wafted though the open door. Outside, rows of corn stretched to the horizon. "There's a sense of renewal here that I've never seen anywhere else," Elliott says.
It occurs to me that for a teacher, the arrival of new students at the start of each school year has a lot in common with the return of crops each summer.
Elliott continues, "Just when you think that the fertile soil can sprout no more, another season comes round, and you see another year of bountiful crops, tall and straight. It makes you proud."
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Why Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Racism Exercise Is So Powerful
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For the past 52 years, teacher and diversity trainer Jane Elliott has been constantly cuffing people about the head — figuratively speaking — on the subject of racism. It's not pretty when the straight-talking Midwesterner launches into her from-the-heart harangue on the evils of racial discrimination. It can be uncomfortable, even — squirm-in-your-seat, stare-at-your-shoes uncomfortable — when she subjects someone to the very same exercise she first unleashed on third graders more than a half-century ago, designed to expose racist thinking. Some think her method can get downright mean .
But, again: The subject is racism. Nothing about it is pretty.
"You think that's traumatizing?" Elliott says of her in-your-face educational methods, which have been alternately vilified and celebrated through the years. "Try living that way for a lifetime."
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Exercise
Education on racism, challenges to ending racism.
Elliott came to prominence when, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr . in 1968, she took her classroom of all-white third graders in Riceville, Iowa, and decided to teach them what it was like to face discrimination. She separated the kids into two groups — those with brown eyes and those with blue — and proceeded to proclaim the brown eyes the "superior" group. She allowed the group extra privileges (more time at recess, seats in the front of the room). They were told they were cleaner. Smarter. More talented.
How the children reacted to this newfound pecking order was startling. The brown-eyed group immediately began to wield their dominance. The blue-eyeds almost immediately slipped into the role of subordinates. Anger flared. Disputes popped up.
After switching roles a few days later, which gave both sides of the classroom a taste of being the "lesser" group, the exercise ended. Many parents, after reading about what happened in Elliott's classroom through student essays printed in the local paper, complained. A month or so later, Johnny Carson invited Elliott to appear on his late-night talk show. She became a national story.
Many praised her efforts at opening her students' eyes. But not everybody. From a 2005 story in Smithsonian Magazine :
Elliott taught for years before she decided to take her anti-racism lesson out of the classroom and into corporate America. She's also led the exercise for the U.S. Department of Education and other governmental groups. She's appeared before numerous church and school assemblies. She often faces uncomfortable, sometimes angry, reactions.
She was on Oprah Winfrey's TV show several times. In June 2020, she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon . Her goal, as it has been for the past 52 years, is education. It's the best weapon against racism, she says.
But good education about racism and race is hard to find.
"Because the educators believe the same thing that they were taught, and they were taught the same thing that I was, which is that there are three or four different races and you can tell what a man's intelligence is by the color of his skin or the shape of his head," says Elliott from her home in Iowa. "You can't lead people out of ignorance if you're still teaching that Columbus discovered America and we came here to civilize these savages.
"We need to teach the three Rs of Rights, Respect and Responsibility," she says, barely taking a breath. "If teachers would respect the rights of those students to learn the truth, and be held responsible for seeing that they present them with the truth, we could kill racism in two generations. There's not a doubt in my mind that that could be done."
For all of her life, Elliott, 87, has seen America grapple with racism. She's marked major mileposts in the struggle over the past 50 or so years: the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of King in the '60s. The race riots in Miami's Liberty City in 1980 and in Los Angeles after the Rodney King beating in 1992.
Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 (the killing of Michael Brown). Baltimore (Freddy Brown) and Charleston, South Carolina, (a church massacre) in 2015. There are many others.
But the problem she has been relentlessly attacking, Elliott says, goes far beyond the occasional race-based flareup. For people of color in the U.S., facing down racism is an everyday fight. Every minute of every day. It's exhausting.
"It's only been going on with me for 52 years," Elliott says. "I know black women who have been doing this for 89 years, and their mothers did and their grandmothers did and their great-grandmothers did. And their daughters and their granddaughters and their great-granddaughters are going to have to do it unless we get off our polyunsaturated fatty acids and do something about this.
"I get paid to talk about it. They aren't even allowed to talk about it."
One of the biggest hurdles in educating people about racism in the United States, Elliott says, is that most everyone knows it exists and knows that it's harmful, but few are motivated to change it. She has stood in front of classes and asked who among the white people in the room would want to switch places with a Black person. No one ever volunteers.
But in 2020, after a lifetime of trying to teach people that humans are one race, that all human life springs from Africa, and that the separation of humans into races has no biological basis and is used only for various (often nefarious) societal reasons, Elliott sees some small signs of promise, maybe a faint sign of movement.
"I think the killing of George Floyd forced people of the pale-faced variety to recognize that the things that Black people have been describing as happening to them every day were finally real for us. Finally," she says. "It was in their face, and they finally had to admit that they have been denying, or ignoring, or justifying what has happened to Black males all these years."
But in the next breath, Elliott cautions that recognizing the problem is only the first step. Correcting it still must be done. And with the current racial tensions in the United States, exacerbated (she believes) by the current president, things could get even worse.
"'Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.' And we are repeating. We are repeating," she says. "I'm seeing this happen, I watch the news, and I go downtown, and oh my god, they're replicating the blue eyes, brown eyes exercise in the national sphere. I can't believe it."
Still, Elliott is nothing if not persistent. She will continue to educate "for the next 50 years," she says. She will push her mantra of " one race ." And she says, she will urge people to get out and vote this November in the hope of electing leaders who will attack racism, as she has, head on.
"There'll be hope after the November election," she says. "That's the only hope we have right now."
The biggest words on Elliott's website are the top headline: One Race . The science behind the simple words is clear. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, your genome — the body's blueprint that contains all of your DNA — is 99.9 percent the same as every human around you.
Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article:
IMAGES
COMMENTS
What Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment? In 1968, schoolteacher Jane Elliott decided to divide her classroom into students with blue eyes and students with brown eyes. The experiment, known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment, is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination.
Normally, "blue-eyes" isn't an insult. However, in this classroom, having blue-eyes had become a condition of inferiority. Consequently, the brown-eyed children started using "blue-eyes" as an insult. The brown-eyed children didn't want to play with the "blue-eyes" during recess. They also harassed them constantly.
Jane Elliott (née Jennison; [2] [3] born November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator.As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class [a] on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the ...
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring ...
On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. Elliott instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings.
One of the most famous experiments in education — Jane Elliott's "blue eyes, brown eyes" separation of her third grade students to teach them about prejudice — was very different from what the public was told, as revealed in this excerpt from the in-depth story about what really happened in that classroom.
Elliott divided her class by eye color — those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those ...
The brown-eyed children could drink from the water fountain, but the blue-eyed children had to use paper cups. The change was instant, Elliott said. The children with brown eyes were suddenly more ...
Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Iowa, devised a controversial exercise to teach her students about racial prejudice after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. She divided the class into brown-eyed and blue-eyed groups and treated them differently, sparking a national debate and a TV appearance.
Elliott came to prominence when, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she took her classroom of all-white third graders in Riceville, Iowa, and decided to teach them what it was like to face discrimination.She separated the kids into two groups — those with brown eyes and those with blue — and proceeded to proclaim the brown eyes the "superior" group.