blue eyes brown eyes experiment results

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)

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• Social Psychology

Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes: The Jane Elliott Experiment

Minimal Groups Today

This paradigm helps understand the current problems related to discrimination . Today, increased migration means more opportunities for people from different backgrounds to interact with each other, which is often a source of conflict.

The people and cultures already present in a place often feel threatened by new immigrants. Their response is to create dichotomies of inferiority and superiority. As a result of those divisions, you see racial discrimination or even terrorism.

The Importance of Discrimination-Free Education

The goal of the minimal group paradigm is to establish subjective differences and create a climate of favoritism. Thus, the dominant group, supported by the authorities, will always have the upper hand. This procedure is sometimes so subtle that no one notices it happening. Some guidelines for avoiding or reducing this effect are:

• Normalize differences . In educational contexts, normalizing superficial differences between children can mitigate feelings of superiority.
• Integration activities. It’s important to mix individuals with different traits, beliefs, and cultures as much as possible and get them working together on a common goal.
• The role of the teacher. In an authoritarian environment, the group closest to the authority figure (in this case, the teacher) feels superior and justified. Consequently, teachers must be mediators, not instigators.

In conclusion, Jane Elliott’s experiment demonstrates the fragility of coexistence and cooperation. It also shows how arbitrary and subjective things can turn friends, family members, and citizens against each other.

“Charity is humiliating because it’s exercised vertically and from above; solidarity is horizontal and implies mutual respect.” -Eduardo Galeano-

This text is provided for informational purposes only and does not replace consultation with a professional. If in doubt, consult your specialist.

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 organization 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?

• Diversity training
• Anti-racism
• Civil rights era

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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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Blue eyes, brown eyes: What Jane Elliott's famous experiment says about race 50 years on

Jane Elliott is 84 years old, a tiny woman with white hair, wire-rim glasses and little patience.

She has been talking about how ridiculous it is to judge someone based on the color of their skin for almost 50 years. She can hardly believe she still has to say it.

“We need to fix this,” she says.

Elliot is best known as the teacher who, on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, put her third-grade students through a bold exercise to teach them about racial prejudice.

She divided the children, who were all white, by eye color, and then she told the children that people with brown eyes were smarter, faster and better than those with blue eyes.

What happened next proved to Elliot that prejudice is a learned behavior.

Which means, she says, it can be unlearned.

It was an exercise that would catapult her into a heated national discussion, land her on television and in newspapers, and eventually make her the subject of a half-dozen documentaries and a mainstay in textbooks.

All these years later, Elliott hasn't stopped talking about what she learned. She thinks her message is more important than ever amid growing conflict over race. She minces no words. She wants you to listen. Really listen.

Maybe you will learn something, too.

One race, the human race

“It’s 10 o’clock, and we’re going to start now,” Elliott announced. It was a Thursday morning, and she was speaking in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University.

About 25 people are there, mostly students, and a few invited guests.

Elliott would speak later that day to a full auditorium of 1,200 people at Central High School in Phoenix as part of ASU’s Project Humanities  campaign to create opportunities for dialogue about issues like this. 

As part of her visit, Elliott had asked to speak with a small group of students.

She got right to it.

“Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the white race, stand up,” Elliott said. A handful of people stood.

“Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the black race, stand up.” Ten or so people got up.

“Stand up if you consider yourself part of the brown race,” she said next.

“Hispanic,” one young man corrected as he stood.

People glanced at each other awkwardly as Elliott continued. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the yellow race,” she said. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the red race,” she said, until everyone was standing.

Elliott studied the room.

“Now everyone who considers themselves part of the human race, sit down,” she said.

Everyone sat down.

This is important to understand, she said. She paused, looking into the faces in front of her.

“There are not four or five different races. There is only one race on the face of the earth, and we are all members of that race — the human race,” Elliott said.

Yes, Elliott knows we have been taught that people can be divided into groups based on shared inherited physical characteristics.

But science has shown that human physical variations don’t fit into neat racial categories, she says. They overlap. Because, genetically, DNA analyses show, all humans are more alike than they are different. Scientists agree that biological races do not exist among humans.

“It is a lie perpetuated so some of us can see ourselves as superior to others,” Elliott said. “You’ve got to stop believing it, and you have got to stop living it.”

Judging people based on skin color is as ridiculous as judging people based on eye color — or gender, religion or sexual orientation, she said. “It’s indecent, it’s not fair and it’s ignorant.”

That was what she wanted to teach her students all those years ago.

The exercise: Brown eyes, blue eyes

Elliott taught third graders at a school in Riceville, Iowa, a small town in rural northern Iowa. 

Her 28 students had filed into the classroom the morning after King was assassinated, talking about what had happened. 

“How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” Elliott had asked her students. All of the children were white.

“It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves? Would you like to find out?”

The children had answered eagerly, “Yes!” 

Elliot separated the blue-eyed children from the children with brown and green eyes. She had the blue-eyed children put on green construction paper armbands.

And then she told the children that the brown-eyed students were smarter.

Elliott came up with an explanation: Intelligence, she told the children, was determined by melanin. She wrote the word on the board. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes — and the smarter the person.

A child noted that Elliott was a “bluey,” yet she was a teacher. A boy piped up to explain that if she had had brown eyes, she would be the principal or superintendent.

Elliott sent the brown-eyed children to lunch first and gave them a longer recess. 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 confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kids. 

The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent. 

The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.

“I watched them exhibit all the behaviors the significant adults in their lives modeled for them,” Elliott said. “I didn’t like what I saw.”

What Elliott said she learned from the exercise was that people are not born prejudiced but learn the behavior. And if it can be learned, she said, it can be unlearned.

'Why is no one outraged about that?'

After the exercise, Elliott asked her students to write about what they had learned, and their essays ran in the Riceville Recorder under the headline, “How Discrimination Feels.”

The Associated Press did a follow-up story. Johnny Carson invited her to be on his show.

When Elliott returned to Riceville, population 840 at the time, from her appearance on “The Tonight Show,” she found her town divided. The other teachers, save a few, snubbed her. Her children were bullied at school, her oldest son beaten up.

She got mail from people who said the exercise taught white children self-contempt and abused their trust. She received death threats.

While controversial, her exercise would be cited as a social science landmark. Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill listed Elliott on a timeline of 30 notable educators, along with Plato, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington and Maria Montessori.

Elliott continued to conduct the exercise in Riceville for nine more years in her third-grade class and another eight years with her seventh- and eighth-grade students.

She argued that it taught children that prejudice was arbitrary and illogical and helped develop empathy.

“It was one day,” Elliott said. “We are worried about white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism for one day when children of color experience real racism every day of their lives.

“Why is no one outraged about that?”

It would have made life easier if Elliott had kept quiet after that, but she said she couldn’t.

“Prejudice is an attitude. It can’t hurt anyone,” she said. “But discrimination is a behavior, and people get killed because of it every day.”

When it is uncomfortable

At ASU, Elliott asked a young man sitting up front if anyone ever referred to him as bi-racial. He nodded. Yes. The next time someone said it, she said, he should respond with, “What other planet do you think I’m from?”

Because, she reminded him, holding up one finger, “One race. The human race.”

Then she asked a young woman, "Has anyone ever said to you, ‘I don’t see you as black?'” 

The woman nodded.

“What did you say?” Elliott asked and when the woman hesitated, she continued: “You were polite, weren’t you? You smiled and didn’t say anything.

“What you should say is, 'You got an eye problem, fool ?'" Everyone laughed.

Because of course, people see color. They pick the color of their car, and of their couch.

“You know why they say that? Because your skin color makes them uncomfortable," Elliott said. "If white folks are uncomfortable because of your skin color, that is because they are ignorant.”

Don’t let people get away with saying things like that, Elliott said. “If we don’t start confronting racist remarks, they will continue to be acceptable,” she said.

The rules of listening

Suddenly Elliot stopped talking, put one hand on her hip and stared at someone in the back of the room who was using a cell phone. 

“You’re not listening,” Elliott said simply. She turned and noticed another student on the other side of the room with a video camera pointed at her.

“Did I give permission?” she asked. “Turn it off.” She told him to put it away, sit in a chair and listen.

We learn a lot by listening, Elliott said, but there are rules. The first one: Good listeners have quiet hands, feet and mouths.

Elliott looked at a young man chewing a cookie. He was suddenly still.

“How are you going to swallow that without moving your mouth?” she said. He swallowed hard and pushed the rest of the cookie on a napkin away from him. So did other people at other tables.

Elliott had thought America had made some positive progress in terms of racism, at least until recently. She thinks she knows why.

“This is the response of white people to eight years of a black man in the White House,” Elliott said.

“That means that we didn’t make progress in the first place. We made people go underground and that’s what they did.”

Now, she said, “It’s like when I go off a diet and eat like a fool.”

“We had to give up our ignorant statements and behaviors for a while, and now the lid is off,” she said.

People can say anything they want now, even march in the streets with swastikas on their arms, she said, and President Donald Trump would say there are “some very fine people” among them.

“Now they can do and be and say anything they want to because they can get away with it,” she said.

Elliott said we have a responsibility to speak up when we hear racist talk and take action when we witness discrimination.

“You can make a difference if you chose to," she said, "or you can just leave these things as they are."

Decide to learn something

Elliott told the students that one of the driving forces in this election was the projection that, within 30 years, white people will have lost their numerical majority in the United States.

“If you are thinking, ‘We are here to talk about racism, so why is she talking about politics?’ you should know that there is nothing in this country that is not impacted by racism,” Elliott said.

She stopped talking again, this time because a woman was taking notes, her head down. Elliott waited until the woman looked up.

The second rule of listening: Good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking.

Elliott sighed. She might as well get all the rules out at once, she said.

The third rule: Good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end.

No interruptions. No thinking about counter-arguments, or what you are going to say when you get a chance.

And then, probably the most important rule: Good listeners decide to learn something.

Afterward, Elliott said listening is imperative for this kind of conversation to take place.

“The listening skills are something that I teach for the classroom," she said, "and for every minute of our lives."

Nothing they could Google or see on their Facebook feed is going to be as real and have the same kind of impact as listening to the person in front of them.

“And if you are going to learn anything, you have to listen, and you have to decide to learn.

“That’s the most important one. You have to decide to learn.”

The exercise: Blue eyes, brown eyes

Elliott left teaching in 1985 and since then, she has traveled the world speaking and sometimes conducting the eye-color exercise in workshops at schools, universities, businesses and government agencies.

She's taken lessons from that first exercise in April 1968, a time that can still bring her to tears when she talks about it and tried to change people's minds about prejudice.

Because there was something a lot of people don't remember about that first exercise. 

On the following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, telling the children that it was blue-eyed students who were smarter. She sent them to lunch first and let them stay at recess longer, the same as before.

But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why.

"They said, ‘I found out what it felt like to be on the bottom, and I did not want to make anyone feel like that ever again,'” Elliott said.

They learned. 

Reach Bland at [email protected] or 602-444-8614.

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Jane Elliot’s famous classroom experiment: How eye color helped her students to understand the effects of discrimination

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• In an effort to demonstrate the effects of discrimination, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott separated her students into two groups: blue eyes and brown eyes.
• First, the students with brown eyes were told that they were superior and given privileges like extra time at recess and seconds at lunch.
• Elliott observed that the brown-eyed group started to boss the blue-eyed group around and also showed an improvement in academic performance.
• Then, the students with blue eyes were declared superior; while the effects were less intense, the blue-eyed group followed suit and also bullied their “inferior” classmates.
• When the experiment was over, Elliott’s students were relieved and ultimately concluded that nobody should be discriminated against based on their appearance.
• Elliott went on to replicate this exercise with future classes as well as other groups outside of the classroom.

Jane Elliott, a former third-grade schoolteacher, was inspired to conduct her “blue eyes/brown eyes” exercise when one of her students asked why Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. In an effort to explain discrimination to her class, Elliott divided the kids into two exclusive groups: blue eyes and brown eyes. From there, she successfully showed her students what it felt like to be discriminated against and made history in the process.

The Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed Experiment: Investigation

On the first day of the experiment, she declared the brown-eyed group superior and gave them extra privileges like seconds at lunch, extra recess time, and access to the new school playground. Additionally, the brown-eyed students got to sit in the front of the class, while the blue-eyed kids were forced to sit in the back. Finally, the brown-eyed children were also encouraged to play only with their fellow brown-eyed classmates, and the two groups drank from different water fountains.

Initially, the brown-eyed group resisted the idea that they were better than the blue-eyed group. However, after Elliott told the children that their melanin levels made them smarter, the kids accepted this information and became arrogant—they were no longer friendly to their blue-eyed classmates. And, interestingly enough, their grades improved and they excelled in the classroom. The blue-eyed kids, on the other hand, performed more poorly on their tests and isolated themselves at recess. In sum, the brown-eyed kids’ academic performance soared while the blue-eyed kids sank. The next day, Elliott reversed the roles. And while the blue-eyed children also taunted their “inferior” classmates, their actions were less intense. Finally, the experiment concluded, much to the relief of Elliott’s students, blue-eyed and brown-eyed alike.

What Were the Implications of This Exercise?

The children were so relieved when the experiment ended that some embraced one another and others cried. They ultimately agreed that people should not be judged based on appearances. However, this doesn’t mean the power didn’t get to their heads in the moment.

When the experiment was over, Elliott asked the students to write down what they had learned. One student revealed : “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.” When she wasn’t part of the “superior” group, however, she said that she felt angry and wanted to quit school. “That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against,” she concluded.

Why Is This Experiment Important?

It’s difficult to understand what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes until you actually put those shoes on your own two feet. Elliott’s exercise did exactly that. Knowing she couldn’t accurately depict what it was like to be discriminated against through your normal lesson plan or discussion, she led the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise. She went on to replicate this exercise in future classes as well as outside of the classroom after she retired from teaching in 1985, helping countless individuals better understand the serious effects of discrimination .

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Creator of famous ‘blue eyes/brown eyes’ exercise, Jane Elliott, returns to CSUSB

News Release

Jane Elliott, who in 1968 developed a classroom experiment for her all-white class of third graders to teach them about discrimination and racism by separating those with blue eyes from those with brown eyes, will speak at Cal State San Bernardino on Thursday, April 7.

“Jane Elliot on Race and Racism,” presented by the university’s Institute for Child Development and Family Relations, will take place in the Santos Manuel Student Union Events Center, room 106, from 2-3:30 p.m., followed by a 25-minute video. The public is invited to the free event; parking at the university is a daily rate of $6.

No stranger to Cal State San Bernardino, Elliott presented a diversity lecture on campus in 1998 as part of Conversations on Diversity lecture series, and as a guest speaker for a psychology social sciences class in 2014 and 2015.

Elliott, who developed what has become known as the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., will show how people can learn to recognize and identify disparities in the ways in which power is assigned and maintained.

She asked her students if they wanted to participate in an exercise to see how discrimination worked. The students agreed. The next day, she separated the children with blue eyes from the children with brown eyes. The blue-eyed children were told they were the superior group and given extra privileges such as more food portions at lunch, more playtime and they sat at the front of the class. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and ignore those with brown eyes.

The brown-eyed children wore collars made of fabric to identify them as a minority group and made to sit in the back rows. Elliott also reprimanded the brown-eyed students when they made mistakes or didn’t follow the rules.

The brown-eyed students initially resisted the notion that the blue-eyed students were better, but Elliott deliberately lied, telling them that the melanin responsible for making the students blue-eyed also gave them higher intelligence and learning ability. As the experiment progressed, the blue-eyed students became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved. The brown-eyed “inferior” classmates changed into timid and subservient children, who isolated themselves during recess. Even their studies suffered. The following week, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed ones in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, it was not as intense.

At the end of the exercise, the students were asked to write down what they learned. The students wrote that it was not right to be judged by the color of their eyes and that the color of their eyes did not make a difference on the type of person they were.

The children’s compositions were printed in the local papers and the story was picked up by the national news media.  The story led to Elliott’s invitation to be a guest on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” to talk about the experiment and the children. After her appearance, the “The Tonight Show” received hundreds of phone calls and letters, many of them complaining. An often-quoted letter states, “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children?”

But not all the reaction was negative. As more people learned about the experiment, Elliott was asked to repeat the exercise and it eventually evolved into professional training for adults. In 1970, Elliott staged the exercise at a White House Conference on Children and Youth, staging it for adults.

Elliot now works as a diversity trainer and lecturer who is recognized most prominently as an anti-racism activist and educator. She has been the focus of two television documentaries, “Eye of the Storm” in 1971 and “A Class Divided” in 1985, and has received many awards, including the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education.

No longer a classroom teacher, Elliott has continued to do the Blue-Eyed/Brown-Eyed exercise, which is considered as the basis for diversity training. She has done training for corporations including General Electric, Exxon, AT& T and IBM. Elliott has also given lectures on diversity to the FBI, IRS, the U.S. Navy, the federal Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. Established in 2002, the CSUSB Institute for Child Development and Family Relations promotes the optimal development and well-being of the children and families in the geographic region through research, providing services, and educating future professionals. The institute draws upon the strengths and expertise of faculty throughout the university, who have devoted their careers to researching and teaching subjects related to both child development and the family dynamic.

The faculty members provide training within established graduate and undergraduate programs. Programs include Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Child Assessment, Special Education, Elementary Education, and Early Childhood Education, Family and Child Health.

For more information on the event, contact Kim McDonald at (909) 537-3679 or by email at [email protected] .

Visit Jane Elliott’s website at for more information about her work.

Also visit the CSUSB Institute for Child Development and Family Relations website for more information on its programs.

Set in the foothills of the beautiful San Bernardino Mountains, CSUSB is a preeminent center of intellectual and cultural activity in inland Southern California. Celebrating its 50 th anniversary in 2015-2016, CSUSB serves more than 20,000 students each year and graduates about 4,000 students annually.

For more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu .

How one teacher transformed her students’ understanding of racism with a single experiment

by Jewish Center for Justice | Aug 10, 2020 | Children , Featured , Ideas , JCJ Blog , Racial Justice

*Photo from www.janeelliott.com*

By Allen Schultz

On April 5, 1968, a class of white third-grade students from Riceville, Iowa all had the same question for their teacher, Ms. Jane Elliott – why was their “Hero of the Month,” Martin Luther King Jr., killed the day before? That is when Ms. Elliott decided to conduct an experiment to teach her students what it felt like to be a minority in the United States. 

The next day, she began class by claiming that blue-eyed people were superior to brown-eyed people in matters of intelligence and behavior. This statement, while met with confused laughs and facial expressions, was quickly accepted by her blue-eyed students. Further, Ms. Elliott gave blue-eyed students extra recess time and required brown-eyed students to wear collars. The belittling of brown-eyed students throughout the day even caused one blue-eyed student to request that she keep a ruler ready in case a brown-eyed student misbehaved. 

Consequently, brown-eyed students complained of both harassment and exclusion. One student said, “[they] felt like [they] didn’t even want to try to do anything.” The term “brown-eyes” quickly gained traction as a pejorative. Ms. Elliott later recalled the horrifying sight of “marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn[ing] into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in the space of 15 minutes.” 

Ms. Elliott changed her tune the following day, claiming that now brown-eyed students were superior to blue-eyed students. She noticed similar results from both the victims and perpetrators, and understood that their perceived hate derived from the small amount of perceived power they had. She also discovered that student performance was tied to whether they felt inferior or superior; students deemed superior finished their math card packs faster, for instance. Both sets of students also reported that whenever they wore the collars, they felt dumb and had trouble paying attention in class.

Once the experiment was complete, Ms. Elliott explained it to the class, reassuring them that they were all equal. While those children maintain a friendship to this day, sharing a bond over what they had learned, their parents weren’t as receptive. One complained that the experiment was cruel, since “black children grow up accustomed to such behavior [from teachers],” but white children aren’t used to it and could, therefore, be traumatized.

The town subsequently turned their backs on Ms. Elliott as she was fired and called an array of slurs. Even her own children were harassed and assaulted at school. Determined to make a change, Ms. Elliott continued her in-class experiments, which even earned her an appearance on Oprah. To this day, Jane Elliott serves as a Black Lives Matter advocate, recently speaking about it on Jimmy Fallon’s virtual talk show.

This experiment teaches us that discrimination is learned, not innate. These children turned on their peers the moment they were informed of the other’s inferiority. Later, when they understood everyone was equal, they accepted that reality. So if it is possible to teach hate, it is also possible to teach love. The experiment also challenges us to reflect on our own education, and whether or not we are biased toward a certain group of people because of what we were taught. 

While many view this as a successful story of how one teacher sought to open a town’s eyes to the consequences of discrimination, we unfortunately continue to see inequalities play out in education today. This is likely due to common misconceptions about the education gap and why people of color more often struggle. What Jane Elliott has shown us through this simple, yet poignant experiment is that discrimination and systematic oppression are real and that just the perception of inferiority or superiority has a profound impact on academic performance and treatment of others. 

Bias still plays a significant role for students of color and the paths schools set for them, which contributes to the School-To-Prison Pipeline and lack of diversity. Jane Elliott is a truly inspiring human being and advocate. And while I am in no way trying to take away from the amazing work she has done over the past 60 years, we cannot blind ourselves to the current systematic biases by only looking at anti-racism success stories of the past. 

It will take many more advocates, like Ms. Elliott, to fight racial injustices in school and achieve higher equality for all students, regardless of the color of their skin.

Allen Schultz is a senior at Palisades Charter High School and recently concluded JCJ’s summer legislative fellowship. Allen is interested in studying political science.

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