Jane Elliott has been running the Blue Eyed,
Brown Eyed exercise for thirty-six years. |
A Small Town Teacher
In 1968 Jane Elliott taught Grade 3 in Riceville,
Iowa, a small, white, Christian farming community.
As an adult everything she had learned convinced
her that negros were no different than whites
other than they knew how it felt to be the object
of prejudice, hate and fear.
She
felt that is wasn't enough to just choose
not to go along with racism. Elliott believed that
it was necessary to take an active role and
protest remarks, advertising, politics and racist
behaviours.
Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had been a 'hero of the
month' in Elliott's classroom. She believed
that "what
he was doing was right for all of us, not just blacks." She
had already discussed racism and prejudice with her
young students.
The evening that King was assassinated Elliott
watched the news with horror. She knew that the next
day her students would ask why their hero had been
killed. Elliott wanted to do more than
talk. That restless night she developed the Blues
Eyes Brown Eyes exercise to demonstrate to her eight
year-olds what it really meant to be black in America.
In Elliott's exercise the blue eyes are made to sit in the middle with
paper collars to mark them. |
A Radical Experiment
The next morning she queried
the children on what they knew about black people
- even though none had ever met one. Their responses
shocked her: they weren't as smart, nor as clean
or civilized and they smelled bad. Then they discussed
what it would be like to be a black child. Elliott's
students quickly became sympathetic and agreed
that it wasn't fair for them to be treated differently.
Next Elliott took the discussion one step further;
she wanted the children to experience racism.
So she divided the class into two groups and
told her students that brown-eyed people were
superior due to the amount of melanin in their
blood and that blue eyed people were lazy, stupid
and not to be trusted.
She removed basic classroom rights from the
blue-eyed students. They weren't permitted
to drink from the water fountain or take a
second helping at lunch. At the same time the
brown eyed kids received preferential treatment
and were permitted to boss around the blues.
Elliott was horrified when she saw how
quickly her students became what she told them
they were. Watching her brown eyed students
act like arrogant, domineering, white
Americans proved to her that racism is learned.
In the following years, she continued to conduct
the exercise with her students.
Elliott says she sees the same racist attitudes all over the world. |
Community Resistance
Elliott's anti-racism activism
didn't score any points in her own community. Her
four children were harassed by their peers
and her parent's business lost customers. Her
family received regular death threats. Every
year parents would phone the school requesting
that their children not be placed in the "nigger-lover's"
class. The majority
of citizens in Riceville were decent, hardworking
people but Elliott was continually harassed
by a vocal and vicious minority.
In the early 80's Elliott was denied an
unpaid leave from the school to run the exercise
for a corporation's employees. She decided
to retire from teaching and re-invented herself
as a diversity trainer.
Racism Now
She now speaks at colleges about racism
and performs the exercise at the request of companies
who feel they could use some diversity training. The major difference, she
says, is that since 1968 people are less likely
to use the world 'nigger'.
Elliott has been a guest on Oprah and profiled
on 60 Minutes. She's taken her exercise around
the world and "learned
that discrimination and it's effects are the
same no matter where you find them."
But she notes that attitudes haven't changed. "What
is distressing is that I get the same results today
with adults that I got using the exercise with
children in 1968."
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