Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes – The Exercise That Taught Children Racism
In 1968, in the town of Riceville, Iowa, a third grade teacher Jane Elliot wanted her eight year old students to understand discrimination. Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated the day before and the Blacks were taking to the streets demanding equal rights as Whites. So she decided to create an exercise whereby her all-white students could actually experience a real life situation. Instead of skin color, Elliot divided her class into two based on the color of the children’s eyes, blue on one side and brown and green on the other. On the first day she stated that ‘melanin’ was the reason that people had brown eyes and higher IQ than those with blue eyes. She bestowed favors on the group with brown eyes, serving them two helpings at lunch, giving them an extra five minutes of recess, telling them they were more intelligent therefore superior to the blue eyed group. She made the blue eyed children drink from paper glasses at the water fountain. The group dynamics of the class changed almost immediately. The brown eyed children started bullying the other group. The children’s academic and behavior patterns changed too. The performance of the brighter blue eyed children dropped while the mediocre brown eyed children seemed to do better. The following day she changed the exercise making the blue group superior to the browns. She noticed that although this time the blue group took the upper hand; their behavior was less aggressive than the brown group the day before. Elliot’s conclusion was, this could be due to the fact that they had been victims the day before and had become sensitive to the pitfalls of discrimination.
Initially Elliot’s experiment was very successful. She repeated it in the following years. The essays written by the children demonstrated that the children understood the “demoralizing effects of bigotry.” (Inglis-Arkell. 2014) She gained recognition; she was invited to the Johnny Carson Show, textbook publishers McGraw-Hill recognized her contributions as a key educator and listed her with renowned names like Confucius, Aristotle, Maria Montessori and others. But her exercise created uproar in the small town of Riceville and she was literally hounded out. In 1970 she demonstrated her exercise at the White House Conference on Children and Youth. She gained fame nationally and internationally, participating in talk shows like Oprah’s and Ellen’s. She started using the exercise on adults, for companies like AT&T, Exxon, General Electric etc. She lectured to the U.S. Navy, Postal Service, IRS and the U.S Department of Education.
The exercise conducted by Elliot almost four decades ago still matters to her students who are now adults, to the town of Riceville, and to the thousands of people across the globe who have participated in programs based on it. Scholars have tried to evaluate the results of her exercise, seeking to understand if it reduced racial prejudices or caused psychological harm to the participants. Although her exercise stirs controversy and gets hugely disparate responses, Jane Elliot’s contribution to the social sciences is widely recognized. She is considered a pioneer in Diversity Training. She holds on to her belief that as a teacher she should “enhance students’ moral development” (Bloom. 2005)
References
Bloom, Stephen G. Lesson of a Lifetime. Smithsonian Magazine. September 2005.
Retrieved from
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/?all
Inglis-Arkell, Esther. The Anti-Racism Exercise That Taught Kids To Be Racist.
io9 We Come From The Future. April 4, 2014. Retrieved from
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-exercise-that-taught-kids-racism-by-teaching-them-t-1558075369
