why did jane elliott conduct her experiment

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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A second look at the blue-eyes , brown-eyes experiment that taught third-graders about racism

Professor of Journalism, University of Iowa

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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.

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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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Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes: The Jane Elliott Experiment

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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.

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In her words

A Teacher Held a Famous Racism Exercise in 1968. She’s Still at It.

The day after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jane Elliott carried out the “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” exercise in her classroom. Now, people are returning to her work.

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

“It makes me really angry that I’ve been saying these things for 52 years.”

— Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher turned anti-racism educator

[In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox .]

As protests against racism started sweeping across America and rest of the world, clips of Jane Elliott , a schoolteacher turned anti-racism educator, began circulating on social media.

Perhaps you’ve seen them.

In one grainy clip from 2001 , Ms. Elliott, with her signature round glasses and clipped white hair, gets into such a heated argument with a white female college student during an educational exercise about racism that the uncomfortable and distraught woman starts crying and storms out of the classroom.

“You just exercised a freedom that none of these people of color have,” Ms. Elliott tells the student, sternly. “When these people of color get tired of racism, they can’t just walk out.”

Or maybe you’ve seen the 2018 video of Ms. Elliott in a round-table discussion on racism with the actress and producer Jada Pinkett Smith, Ms. Pinkett Smith’s daughter, Willow, and Ms. Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris .

“I’m not a white woman. I’m a faded Black person,” Ms. Elliott says, stunning the hosts. “My people moved far from the Equator, and that’s the only reason my skin is lighter.”

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Updates: The Fight Against Racial Injustice

America reckons with racial injustice, we are repeating the discrimination experiment every day, says educator jane elliott.

Rachel Martin

Simone Popperl

Avery Keatley

Emma Bowman

Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images hide caption

Jane Elliott, an educator and anti-racism activist, first conducted her blue eyes/brown eyes exercise in her third-grade classroom in Iowa in 1968.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ."

As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed.

She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people.

More than 50 years after she first tried that exercise in her classroom, Elliott, now 87, said she sees much more work left to do to change racist attitudes. The May 25 killing of George Floyd set off weeks of nationwide protests over the police abuse and racism against black people, plunging the U.S. into a reckoning of racial inequality.

"It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition . "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis."

When Elliott first conducted the exercise in 1968, brown-eyed students were given special privileges. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw.

The students started to internalize, and accept, the characteristics they'd been arbitrarily assigned based on the color of their eyes.

Code Switch

Dispatches from the schoolyard.

'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About Race

Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight.

"She said, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, 'I don't know why you're doing that — I thought it was about time somebody shot that son of a bitch,' " she said. "Not one of them reprimanded her for that or even corrected her. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded."

The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch.

"No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said.

Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country.

Still, Elliott said the last few years have brought out America's worst racist tendencies. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said.

"People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. "Probably because they have been taught how they're treated in this country — that they have to understand us. [White people] on the other hand, don't have to understand them. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily."

But the protests happening now have given her hope.

"Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? I think it can."

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Reading Room

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: On Race and Jane Elliott’s Famous Experiment on Prejudice

by Stephen G. Bloom

I t started with a phone call. “Is this Stephen Bloom?” an emphatic voice asked out of the blue one spring morning seventeen years ago. Without waiting for a response, the caller sprinted ahead. “Well, this is Jane Elliott and I want to talk to you!” I had never spoken with or met Elliott before and I had no idea why she’d be calling me. She seemed insistent and determined. The only thing I knew about Elliott was a provocative classroom experiment credited to her.

For a decade, Elliott, a teacher in a small, rural Iowa town, had separated her third-grade students, for two days, into two groups—those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. On the first day, she told the blue-eyed children that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed children. She instructed the blue-eyed kids that they wouldn’t be permitted to play on the jungle gym or swings. They’d have to use paper cups if they wanted to drink from the water fountain. They wouldn’t be allowed second lunch helpings. The next day, Elliott switched the students’ roles. The brown-eyed kids would now be considered inferior. The experiment was Elliott’s way of showing eight- and nine-year-old White children what it was like to be Black in America. Starting in the mid-1980s and for the next thirty-five years, Elliott would increase the experiment’s voltage by trying it out on adults in thousands of workshops worldwide.

I asked Elliott why she had called me, and without hesitation, she responded, “Because I want you to write a book about me.” Elliott’s moxie piqued my curiosity, and as soon as I got off the phone, I set out to learn more.

Years before the Black Lives Matter movement or the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in the summer of 2020, Elliott, a White woman from out-of-the-way Iowa, had transformed herself into an international authority on all issues of racism and bias. An award-winning network TV documentary had aired about her, followed by a starring role at a headline- sparking White House conference on education. By 1984, Elliott had left her public school teacher’s job in Riceville, Iowa (population: 806), sixteen miles from the Wisconsin state line, and had taken the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment on the road. She tried it on tens of thousands of adults, in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. She traveled to conferences and corporate workshops.

She took the experiment to prisons, schools, and military bases. She appeared on Oprah five times. Elliott became a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities. In the process, she had turned herself into America’s mother of diversity training.

Elliott was so successful at what she did that she was granted membership in the historic pantheon of the West’s most revered educators: Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Paulo Freire. In 2004, the American publishing giant, McGraw Hill, created a multipanel poster suitable for classroom display that included Elliott along with the other venerated thinkers and teachers. To me, Elliott’s separation of students based on their eye color seemed like a risky experiment that raised all kinds of ethical issues. In fact, as I was to learn, the experiment had been inspired by Nazis, as Elliott would be the first to admit. She had lied to impressionable children who trusted her. She had told them that half of the class was less intelligent because of their eye color, because of their genetics. The experiment became so real that fistfights erupted on the Riceville Elementary School playground. That seemed bad enough. But Elliott did nothing to stop the fights. She encouraged them, based on the children’s newly granted superiority or inferiority. That was part of duping the children into thinking that the experiment was real.

Elliott had constructed a gut-wrenching, true-life nightmare in order to make an indelible point that would stay with her students for the rest of their lives. In essence, she tried to induce a dose of racism into the minds of the third graders.

It all began the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, when Jane Elliott asked her all-White third-grade students “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl? It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”

A spontaneous cheer arose from the children. YAAAAAAAAY! And so began one of the most astonishing exercises ever conducted in an American classroom. That spring morning 50 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. “It might be interesting to judge people by the color of their eyes,” Elliott teased. “Would you like to try?” Elliott then 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.”

“They are not,” one blue-eyed boy said under his breath from the group in the back. “Oh, yes, they are!” Elliott said, her eyes open wide. She wagged her index finger at the blue-eyed boy with the audacity to question her. “Brown-eyed people are more intelligent than blue-eyed people. It’s about time you knew the truth. You’re old enough to know this.”

Elliott issued more directives. “All you brown-eyed children, push your desks to the front of the room.” The children looked puzzled. “You heard me. Push them to the front. You’re the smarter kids. That’s where you belong!” The comment didn’t seem to register with the children, so Elliott repeated it. “Go ahead,” she told the brown-eyed group. “You ought to be sitting up front. Blue-eyed children, push your desks to the back. As far away as you can!”

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 browneyed boy asked. Just before Elliott could answer, brown-eyed Steven Knode jumped in. “If she didn’t have ’em blue eyes, she’d be the principal!” Elliott couldn’t help but grin, at least to herself, not just for Steven’s insight, but because Mr. Brandmill, the principal, did, in fact, have brown eyes.

Next, she informed the children that no one from the blue-eyed group would be allowed on the playground equipment, because, she said, “They’re careless. Everyone knows that. They might break something.” Elliott went further, instructing the brown-eyed children not to allow any of the blue-eyed kids to play with them—even if they were friends. “Brown-eyed children need to play only with brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children, you play among yourselves. There will be no exceptions. Does everyone understand?” “Yes, Mrs. Elliott.” Elliott issued more rules. The blue-eyed children would have to wait for the brown-eyed students to finish before being allowed to eat lunch. For recess, the brown-eyed children would get five more minutes. “Do you understand, children? Have I made myself clear?” Yes, Mrs. Elliott!

For the rest of the morning, Elliott was unrelenting. While on the playground, brown-eyed Bruce Fox would later recall, “Mrs. Elliott told a boy who was getting bullied that the next time that happens, ‘You smack ’em in the nose.’ She put her fingers together in a fist to show how it ought to be done.” If blueeyed students were playing jump rope or kickball, Fox remembered, Elliott urged the brown-eyed kids, “You take it away from them! That’s your right! Do it! ” A brown-eyed student, Debra Anderson, recalled, “One of my friends had blue eyes, and I couldn’t play with her. I kinda hung out by myself and played on the swings and the monkey bars. I felt sick.”

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 browneyed 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, a smart, tall, blue-eyed girl by the name of Carol Anderson, who never had problems with arithmetic, started making all kinds of mistakes when Elliott called on her. When Carol walked across the room, her shoulders slumped and she dragged her feet. Carol had always had a ramrod-straight posture, but since the morning, she had turned into a different person. Anyone could see that all the confidence that had once defined her had disappeared. During recess in the schoolyard, Carol, flushed and red in the face, came running to Elliott, sobbing. Three brown-eyed girls had ganged up on her, and one of them had hit her, warning, “You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we’re better than you are! Mrs. Elliott said so!”

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 blue-eyed kids were much less nasty than the browneyed 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. Not an assistant, a producer, or a long-distance operator. It was Carson himself. Before Elliott could catch her breath, Carson announced, “We’d like you to come on the show and talk about the experiment you did on the kids in your class, the one separating the blue-eyed kids from the brown-eyed kids.”

Carson’s invitation to Elliott to appear on the show had been an experiment itself. A year earlier, Carson had told author Alex Haley for a Playboy interview that he sympathized with Black protesters. In a restrained, allholds- barred interview, he allowed, “It all comes down to just one basic word: justice —the same justice for everyone — in housing, in education, in employment and, most difficult of all—in human relations. And we’re not going to accomplish that until all of us, Black and White, begin to temper our passion with compassion.”

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.

Elliott’s message on Tonight Show No. 1442 came across blunt and unfiltered. Blacks in America were treated as second-class citizens and Whites didn’t have a clue about it. And even if they did, the last thing Whites were about to do was reshuffle the stacked deck Blacks had been dealt. Elliott’s solution was to teach children, kids as young as eight years old, the damage that Whites imparted every day to Blacks. And the best approach was to follow Lloyd Jennison’s “Indian” maxim: to walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins.

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.

Through persistence, diligence, and perhaps worst of all, in the eyes of Riceville, sheer ambition, Elliott had catapulted herself to immortality. Regarded, respected, revered. Outside Riceville, she was a visionary, a combination of Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and maybe even Joan of Arc. Inside, she was a con artist. Elliott hated the values that some Riceville parents had instilled in their children. Elliott seemed to know what these young children would grow up to become—unless she imprinted her wisdom on their squishy, developing brains. Elliott’s mission was to administer a mind-altering social-experiment inoculation, even though neither the kids nor their parents had asked for such a vaccination.

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.

For a host of reasons, some serendipitous, others calculated, the experiment Elliott popularized in 1968 multiplied at dizzying, geometric speed. It spread to other teachers and school districts across the nation and around the world. Thousands of teachers and trainers would adopt the experiment and try it out on students young and old. During the dawning era of multiculturalism, hundreds of corporations used the experiment on their workers. For some who sat at Elliott’s feet, it changed them for the good. The experiment exposed them to racism and its far-reaching impact. But for others, decades after being tormented by an experiment ostensibly designed to teach about racism, many of her subjects still feel the wallop of Elliott’s smack-them-over-the-head method. For more than a few who experienced it, Elliott’s self-proclaimed exercise turned into a monster experiment.

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 Washington University, says the exercise helps develop character and empathy. And Stanford University 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 Prison 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.”

In 2003, Tracie Stewart, a social psychologist at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, was the lead author in a study to gauge the efficacy of the blueeyes, brown-eyes experiment. Stewart used as her test case a workshop that Elliott conducted in 2000 with students at Bard College, a small, private undergraduate institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York State. So as not to skew their findings, Stewart and her coinvestigators looked for Bard students who hadn’t heard of the experiment or of Elliott. Once accepted into the workshop, participants signed informed consent forms: “You should be aware that the learning exercise may be a difficult experience for some. Participants will take part in group discussions during which they may be exposed to harsh comments and uncomfortable conditions…. If you have a medical condition that might be aggravated by stressful situations or feel that you should avoid stressful situations at the present time, do not sign up for this project.”

Elliott conducted the experiment, which started early on a Saturday morning and lasted eight hours. She followed her routine, sorting forty-seven participants into a blue-eyed (and green- and hazel-eyed) group and a brown-eyed cohort. The blues were crowded into a small, stuffy room with half the number of chairs as people, while the browns were served a full breakfast in a comfortable setting. Per her drill, Elliott prompted the brown-eyed participants to act rudely toward the other group when the two sections convened. She also gave the brown-eyed students answers to an IQ test she would administer to both groups later that day.

When the two groups merged, Elliott had the blueeyed students, wearing collars, sit in the middle of the room while the brown-eyed group sat on either side as though they were observing the “inferior” group. She proceeded to criticize the blues. She had them stand one at a time and read derogatory passages denigrating blue-eyed people. She scolded their performances. When the browns outscored the blues on the fake IQ test, Elliott amped up her scorn of the blues. She picked a blue-eyed, blond woman for ridicule, announcing to everyone that she wasn’t a natural blonde and likely dyed her hair. To another woman, Elliott commented about her “cute butt” and “bedroom voice.” All the while, she encouraged the brown-eyed students to join in on the hectoring. The insults got so intense that two blueeyed students started to cry. One got up and left.

The two groups broke for lunch, returned to debrief, watched the 1970 ABC video “Eye of the Storm,” ate hors d’oeuvres together in the late afternoon, and then left, the experiment officially over. During the next four to six weeks, both groups were assessed by Stewart and her colleagues to see if the experiment had made any impact on their self-awareness of prejudice and racism.

The results were decidedly mixed. The responses from the students mirrored what participants in the U.S. West pluralism workshops in the 1980s had said. They noted a multitude of insults and pain shared by the participants, but minimal change in attitude. Among the student reactions:

“As a Blue Eyes, I was uncomfortable and on edge. I found myself easily angered by anything Jane Elliott said. I felt frustrated and helpless to stop her charade (she was good at her job).” “I feel some of it was unethical, however, there were so many positive responses I can only believe that the positive outweighs the negatives…. I’ve had a few nightmares, but this is typical…” “Makes people upset; doesn’t change much; too negative for me.” “I felt emotionally low after the experiment [exercise]. I wanted to try to forget some of the things that were said or done on the day of the experiment, but I guess that’s what made it so effective.”

Stewart’s thoughts today about the experiment are “proceed with caution.” She said that the experiment may have a positive impact on reducing negative racial attitudes “in the short term,” but any long-term benefits are negligible. Stewart no longer shows videos of Elliott in her undergraduate psychology classes because “there tends to be a greater focus on Jane Elliott herself than the issue of institutional racism.”

A larger, systematic review, published in 2009, that assessed the effectiveness of scores of anti-bias workshops and experiments summarily suggested that further study was needed. “We conclude that the casual effects of many widespread prejudice-reduction interventions, such as workplace diversity training and media campaigns, remain unknown. Although some intergroup contact and cooperation interventions appear promising, a much more rigorous and broad-ranging empirical assessment of prejudice reduction strategies is needed to determine what works.” In other words, the social scientists weren’t able to say that any crash course to modify racial prejudice works.

Today, teachers still readily employ the blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment. For many, it is an inspired and clever way to introduce the concept of discrimination and race to youngsters.

In 2009, Elliott took the experiment to Great Britain, where she performed it for a television documentary called The Event in London. There, the thirty participants were adults. Following her script, Elliott threw profanity-laced insults at the collared “inferior” group of blue-eyed participants. As during the experiment’s last iteration on The Oprah Show , the experiment imploded. Many of the UK participants refused to tolerate Elliott’s bullying and walked out.

The show hired two psychologists to stand in the wings during the experiment in case anyone needed intervention, as well as to provide a sports-style playby- play commentary for viewers at home. One was Dominic Abrams, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent, who today, more than a decade later, doesn’t quite know what to think of Elliott or what she did. “She is a very strong personality and did not appear to treat challenge as anything other than a battle to be won. She certainly had no desire to engage with me as a psychologist (or indeed as a person), so other than her brusque manner toward myself and the production team (which may have been partly an extension of her character part for the day), it was difficult to gain a sense of what she might have been thinking or intending,” Abrams wrote in an email.

Guardian journalist Andrew Anthony was less sanguine. Writing about the British iteration of the experiment, Anthony noted, “Nowadays, grey-haired and mean-eyed, she’s honed her shtick to that of a drill sergeant or prison commandant. She describes herself as the ‘resident bitch for the day,’ and speaks to the blue-eyed contingent as though they were criminally stupid or stupidly criminal. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut,’ she tells one smiling blue-eyed young man. ‘I don’t play second banana.’ The performance suggests someone who would be a natural in a Maoist re-education camp: self-righteous, vindictive and unswervingly convinced of her case.”

Anthony concluded that Elliott was “more excited by White fear than she is by Black success.”

This article appeared in Skeptic  magazine 27.3 Buy print edition Buy digital edition Subscribe to print edition Subscribe to digital edition Download our app

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 remains as sharp-tongued, contrary, resolute, and opinionated as ever. She has updated her lectures to include a range of contemporary issues: the concept of race (“There’s only one race, the human race”); the Black Lives Matter movement (“It’s insane what we’ve been doing to people of color for the last 250 years”), White supremacists (“They’re coming out of the woodwork”), persistent women (“‘Bitch’ is an acronym for ‘Being in Total Control, Honey’”), former President Trump (“He is basing his political philosophy on writings of Adolf Hitler”), racism among White evangelicals (“Jesus did not look like the little Pillsbury Doughboy”), and oppression of Native Americans (“We call Native Americans ‘savages’ but it was Whites who killed them and stole their lands”). Her most recent lectures mention COVID-19, as well as the LGBTQ and Latinx communities. Elliott hasn’t given up her interest in public education, which is at the center of any presentation she gives (“We could destroy racism in two generations by changing what is taught in classrooms all over the United States, but first we’d have to change the level of racism among the teachers”).

For decades, Elliott has issued sweeping generalizations, including her oft-repeated declaration that all Whites in America are racists. “If you are looking at a White person who was born, reared, and schooled in the United States, then you are looking at a racist,” she told an audience at the University of Northern Colorado as far back as 1993. “Blacks aren’t racist; they are only reacting to the actions of Whites.”

Elliott often refers to herself as “a faded Black person.” When she spoke with actress Jada Pinkett Smith on her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk , in 2018, she said, “My people moved far from the Equator and that’s the only reason my skin is lighter. That’s all any White person is.” She concedes that as a White woman speaking about how some Black people might feel, she may be guilty of accusations that she’s a charlatan and a poseur. “There are those Blacks who ask me what a White woman like me is doing talking about their experience, since I can’t possibly know what it’s like to walk in their shoes. Sometimes I’m accused of just running another White woman’s game. Those are valid criticisms.”

What truly motivated Elliott to introduce an experiment to a roomful of third graders and to make two days last more than five decades? Perhaps she was seeking an exit from what she envisioned would be her own humdrum life. She had something personal to prove, a game of one-upmanship amid a landlocked sea of naysayers who had looked down on her ever since she’d been born. What was it about her that seemed to require that she push the limits, shocking everyone—starting with children? Was it to make up for the shortcomings the locals had assigned her? Was it to make her father proud? Was it to get back at the locals and their sense of what it meant to be successful, particularly as a woman? Was it to show the other teachers in the chatty teachers’ lounge how horribly wrong they were?

Based on the author’s 2021 book Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality , published by University of California Press, excerpted with permission. © 2021 by Stephen G. Bloom

About the Author

Stephen G. Bloom is a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and author of six nonfiction books: Postville ; Inside the Writer’s Mind ; Tears of Mermaids ; The Oxford Project ; The Audacity of Inez Burns ; and Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes .

Stephen Bloom on The Michael Shermer Show

Listen to Michael Shermer’s conversation with Stephen Bloom exploring the never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. Shermer and Bloom discuss: Jane Elliott and how she came to conduct her famous experiment • reactions to it (in the classroom, locally, nationally, internationally) • whether the “experiment” was really more of a demonstration • public interest, from Johnny Carson to Oprah Winfrey • the questionable ethics of the experiment • what it reveals about tribalism, racism, obedience to authority, role playing, social proof • whether the experiment reveals hidden racist attitudes or creates them in children • Does it indicate bad apples or bad barrels? • race sensitivity training programs, then and now (and why they don’t really work) • what drives moral progress • the future of journalism.

This article was published on November 22, 2022.

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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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Published Feb 6, 2019

Taylor Bennett is the Head of Content at Thriveworks. She received her BA in multimedia journalism with minors in professional writing and leadership from Virginia Tech. She is a co-author of “Leaving Depression Behind: An Interactive, Choose Your Path Book.”

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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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Jane Elliott, Creator of the "Blue/Brown Eyes" Experiment, Says Racism Is Easy To Fix

More than 50 years after her famous exercise, Elliott is still fighting. "The racists carry on, so I carry on."

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The lives and legacies of Dr. Jane Elliott and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are inextricably linked.

On April 4 1968, King was killed by the single bullet of a lone assassin as he stood outside Room 306 on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The reverberations of that fateful day would be felt the world over, but it was the following day that would change Elliott’s life forever.

Paying homage to King, it was then that the white schoolteacher in the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, devised an exercise to enable her third-grade students to experience first-hand what prejudice, discrimination, and racism felt like.

In what is now famously known as the “blue eyes, brown eyes” exercise, Elliott divided her class into two groups based on a characteristic over which they had no control: eye color. Blue-eyed students were placed in one group, and brown-eyed students in the other. Members of both groups were treated according to the color of their eyes.

On the first day, Elliott convinced the brown-eyed students that they were “better,” “smarter,” and “superior” to their blue-eyed counterparts and, as such, they were entitled to privileges such as more recess time and access to a water fountain. The next day, she reversed the roles.

Elliott was astounded by the results.

In a PBS documentary about her work entitled A Class Divided , she said: “I watched wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders.”

For decades, Elliott repeated the exercise with elementary school students, college students, and professionals around the world, consistently finding that participants would turn against each other for no other reason than the color of their eyes.

Today in 2020, Elliott still believes as she did back in 1968 that “white people keep feeling, thinking and talking this racist way until they’ve experienced some of the same treatment that people of color live with every day.”

At the time, the exercise was considered controversial, in part, because–for just a few short hours–it forced white people to experience a semblance of the pain Black people do. For instance, it wasn’t uncommon for white participants, who likely hadn’t experienced overt discrimination based on their skin color, to abandon the exercise in fits of rage, and sometimes even in floods of tears. Such was the perceived level of humiliation and powerlessness they experienced.

Overall, however, the exercise demonstrated that, if prejudicial, while discriminatory and racist behaviors can be learned, they can also be unlearned.

In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day, archival clips of Elliott’s exercise began making the rounds on social media —thrusting her anti-racism work back into the spotlight it had occupied 52 years prior. Particularly relevant in this racially-charged climate, Elliott’s experiential exercise is a palpable representation of discrimination in action.

And more than five decades later, Elliott is still a force to be reckoned with.

At 86 years old, the pioneer of the anti-racism exercise is still in demand—and she’s as straight-talking, incisive (and quick-witted) as ever. Speaking from her home in the rolling plains and cornfields of Iowa, the former schoolteacher turned anti-racism educator hasn’t lost a step since she first hit TV screens in 1992 on The Oprah Winfrey Show .

Despite being universally recognized as the creator of the famed exercise, Elliott is quick to refute this. Instead, she only lays claim to having “adapted” it.

“I didn’t create the exercise. I learned it from Adolf Hitler,” she tells OprahMag.com matter-of-factly. “One way he decided who went into the gas chamber was by eye color. If you had a good, German name, but you had brown eyes, they made sure you went to the gas chamber, because they thought you might be a Jewish person who was trying to pass. They killed hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of eye color alone .”

Raised on a farm in northeast Iowa, Elliott was born in 1933—the same year Hitler came to power, and she often likens the current state of race relations in the U.S. to Hitler’s exploits in Europe from 1933 to 1945. In adapting the exercise, Elliott says her intention was that “anybody going through it would relate to what Jews went through then—and what Blacks are going through now.

“I wanted people to experience that and gain empathy. Not education, but empathy.”

But the uphill battle to defeat racism isn’t just about lack of empathy. It’s about economics. Prince Harry was recently quoted as saying: “When it comes to institutional and systemic racism, it’s there and it stays there because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it.” Elliott agrees. “Racism is profit-making behavior,” she says.

She adds: “Read Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow—Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . Thanks to people like Bill Clinton who started the ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ nonsense, we put mostly young Black males in prison. They’re forced to work eight hours a day and, in many cases, they’re paid 20 cents an hour . It’s a new form of slavery. Make no mistake about this: it’s a way to make a lot of money.”

The uphill battle to defeat racism isn’t just about lack of empathy. It’s about economics.

Whatever the reason for the perpetuation of racism, its harmful effects have long been well-documented. In 1969, the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children acknowledged that racism was America’s “ number one public health problem ” among children. Tellingly, Elliott points out, “they didn’t say Black children. They said all children.”

She continues: “Thinking your skin makes you superior is absolutely ridiculous. To think somebody else’s skin color makes that person inferior is equally ridiculous, but much more harmful. Because if you think you’re right and everybody else is wrong and, like our current president, you can get enough people to agree with you, you can destroy people of color on a daily basis. We do that all day in this country.”

Fast-forward 51 years from the Joint Commission’s report to 2020. In July, CNN shared findings from a study that revealed that racial discrimination may increase stress, lead to health problems, and hamper the cognitive function of Black women. Why Black women in particular? Elliott believes it's “because their sons and husbands are in constant danger.”

“As has been amply demonstrated over the past few months, during wartime, we send Black men to fight in our wars and die. In peacetime, we make war on them in this country. Black women know that.”

Despite her scathing assessment of the state of US race relations, Elliott fervently believes that racism is easy to fix. She offers a two-part solution to the problem: the first is philosophical, and the second is practical. Step one: “Stop believing there’s more than one race. Realize that we’re all members of the same race. The human race.”

She adds that, from the age of five to 18, people aren’t educated, but rather “indoctrinated” to believe in the myth of white superiority. But any myth can be debunked and Elliott outlines the roadmap to destroy the myth of race using the same tool that was used to construct it— literature .

“I’d start by insisting that every child reads the book, The Color of Man , by Robert Cohen,” she said. “I’d also insist that every educator reads all the books listed in the bibliography on my website.”

Step two? “Change housing segregation practices.”

In an interview with Slate magazine, Richard Rothstein talks about his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . He rejects the idea that America’s metropolitan areas are ‘de facto’ segregated—that is, the product of private individuals’ choices about where to live. According to Rothstein, most residential segregation can’t be attributed to the private choices of homebuyers or even prejudices held by realtors and lenders—and the separation of many US neighborhoods has been at the core of federal housing policy for decades.

If prejudicial, discriminatory and racist behaviors can be learned, they can also be unlearned.

Elliott, too, believes that racially-segregated neighborhoods in the US are the product of ‘de jure’ segregation—residential segregation that is mainly a consequence decided by law rather than a matter of personal choice among residents. “Anybody who thinks all the residential segregation we have is de facto segregation is wrong. Believe me, this can be taken care of. We simply have to change these housing segregation practices .”

While Elliott shows no signs of calling time on her anti-racism activism, she does have her eyes firmly fixed on the future of the exercise that made her famous. She’s even contemplating passing the torch to some of her family members so they can follow in her footsteps—whether they choose to lead the exercise with third-grade students, college students, professionals or all of the above, as Elliott did.

“I have a daughter who would be good at leading the exercise, so she’s studying to do it. I also have three granddaughters who could lead it very well. Because they’ve listened to me a lot, they’ve learned some things that convinced them that a lot of what they learned is nonsense,” she said.

An essential part of the exercise, which Elliott says she “hates,” involves being unrelenting in her ridicule and humiliation of the “inferior” group—subjecting them to discriminatory statements like “brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people. This is a fact.”

According to Elliott, “white women have to lead the exercise, because people won’t listen to Black women. Coming from a man, no one is going to put up with the kinds of things I say during the exercise. They’ll take it from a woman. They’ll take it from a white woman.”

Ultimately, Elliott is shocked and saddened that the need for her anti-racism exercise is as pressing in 2020 as it was in 1968. For her, she says it’s a bit like watching the movie Groundhog Day , where the main character wakes up in the morning only to realize that he’s reliving the same day over and over again.

So what motivates Elliott to continue her anti-racism endeavors? “What motivates the racists to carry on?” she asked in response. “The racists carry on, so I carry on. When they stop, I will.”

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Formerly an editor at Reuters, Kieron Johnson is a business reporter at BBC News. He is also a content consultant to emerging and established brands. A native of London, England, Kieron currently lives on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean with his wife, daughter and soon-to-be pet budgie (whose names also begin with the letter ‘K’).

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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 .

The Daring Racism Experiment That People Still Talk About 20 Years Later (VIDEO)

More than 20 years ago, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" conducted an experiment about racial prejudice that audiences will never forget. The year was 1992 -- in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles riots that erupted after the acquittal of police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King -- and racial tensions in the country were running high. Yet, the "Oprah Show" audience members didn't suspect a thing when they arrived at the studio and were immediately separated into two distinct groups.

The division wasn't based on skin color, but eye color. "What we did was treat each group differently, discriminating against the people who have blue eyes, catering to those people with brown eyes," Oprah explained back then.

As the audience lined up to enter the studio, the blue-eyed people were pulled out of line, told to put on a green collar and wait outside. The brown-eyed people were told to step to the front of the line. Once indoors, the brown-eyed group was then treated to coffee and doughnuts, while the blue-eyed group could only stand around and wait. When the blue-eyed group saw that the brown-eyed group was going to be seated first, some became upset.

"Look at those people! What are they doing in there?" one woman shrieked.

When the show began, Oprah welcomed diversity expert Jane Elliott to the stage. Elliott helped set up the experiment, and she knowingly added fuel to the fire when she spoke. "I've been a teacher for 25 years in the public, private and parochial schools in this country, and I have seen what brown-eyed people have done as compared to what blue-eyed people do. It's perfectly obvious," she said. "You should have been here this morning when we brought these people in here."

Feeling discriminated against, the blue-eyed audience members stood to voice their frustrations.

"She was rude to us! All of us!" one woman said. "Yelled at us, called us names, pushed us aside. She was rude!"

"Why doesn't Jane have a green collar on? She's got blue eyes," another pointed out.

Elliott didn't hesitate in her answer. "Because I've learned to act brown-eyed," she said. "And the message in this room is, act brown-eyed and you, too, can take off your collar."

The blue-eyed people were flabbergasted, but it wasn't long before the brown-eyed people bought into the idea that they were superior. "People, I had a girlfriend in school who was blue-eyed. She was so stupid, she was always copying off of my papers," said one brown-eyed woman. "These [blue-eyed] people were so rude and so noisy today, we couldn't hear ourselves even talk!"

Eventually, the audience figured out that the show was really about race. "God created one race: the human race," Elliott told them. "Human beings created racism."

Twenty-two years after that memorable episode, "Oprah: Where Are They Now?" caught up with Elliott, who still gets emotional when talking about the catalyst that led her to create the blue-eyed-brown-eyed experiment in 1968.

"Martin Luther King, Jr. had been one of our 'heroes of the month' in February in my third-grade classroom, and he was dead at the hands of an assassin," Elliott says, getting choked up. "I hate to talk about this because every time I talk about it, I remember how it felt that day. I was going to have to go into my classroom and explain to my students why the adults in this country had allowed somebody to kill hope. Martin Luther King, for me, was hope for this country."

In an effort to get her small-town, all-white class to experience what it was like to walk in someone else's shoes, she created the eye-color experiment. "I decided the next day that I was going to do what Hitler did. I was going to pick out a group of people on the basis of a physical characteristic over which they had no control, separate them... treat one group badly and treat the other group very well, and see what would happen," Elliott says.

Why eye color? "Eye color and skin color are caused by the same chemical: melanin," Elliott explains. "There's no logic in judging people by the amount of a chemical in their skin. Pigmentation should have nothing to do with how you treat another person, but unfortunately, it does."

What she found with the experiment is how incredible its impact can be.

"Give me a child at the age of 8 and let me do that exercise, and that child is changed forever," Elliott says.

Throughout January, OWN hosts a month-long celebration honoring civil rights legends, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the historic Selma to Montgomery marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

When civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, grief and frustration erupted in America's cities. And far away in Iowa, one third grade teacher knew she had to do something.

The shooting of Martin Luther King could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa. I knew that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it. Because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.

It was a daring experiment in prejudice.

I watched wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders.

Can one teacher, in one day, change the lives of her students forever?

Tonight, a Frontline classic, A Class Divided.

[THEME MUSIC]

August 1984, a high school reunion brings some 50 former students to Riceville, Iowa. Eleven of them, some with their spouses and children, arrive early for a special reunion with their former third grade teacher, Jane Elliott.

This is my husband, Tom.

Tom! Bryan!

How are you?

Oh, I'm just fine.

Roy Wilson.

You darling!

It's been a long time. Haven't been here in--

I'm so glad to see you.

--14 years.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

How are you doing?

A long time since I've seen you.

Yeah, it has been.

Where are your little ones?

They're at home with mom.

And this is your husband, Mr.--

Greg Rollin.

Greg Rollin. Nice to meet you.

Fourteen years earlier, when they were students in her third grade classroom, ABC News filmed a two-day exercise for a documentary, The Eye of the Storm. Now, at their request, they will see that film again and relive the experience of her unique lesson in discrimination.

[CHILDREN SINGING "GOD BLESS AMERICA"]

This is a special week. Does anybody know what it is?

National Brotherhood Week. What's brotherhood?

Be kind to your brothers?

Be kind to your brothers.

Like you would like to be treated.

Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated. Treat everyone as though he was your--

Brother. And is there anyone in this United States that we do not treat as our brothers?

The black people.

The black people. Who else?

Absolutely, the Indians. And when you see-- when many people see a black person, or a yellow person, or a red person, what do they think?

Look at the dumb people.

Yeah, look at the dumb people. What else do they think sometimes? What kinds of things do they say about black people?

They're "negroos," niggers.

In the city, many places in the United States, how are black people treated? How are Indians treated? How are people who are of a different color than we are treated?

Like they aren't part of this world. They don't get anything in this world.

Why is that?

Because they're a different color.

You think you know how it would feel to be judged by the color of your skin?

I don't-- do you think you do? No, I don't think you would know how that felt, unless you had been through it. Would you? It might be interesting to judge people today by the color of their eyes. Would you like to try this?

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Since I'm the teacher, and I have blue eyes, I think maybe the blue-eyed people should be on top the first day.

You mean up here? [INAUDIBLE]

I mean, the blue-eyed people are the better people in this room.

Oh yes they are. Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.

My dad isn't that stupid.

Is your dad brown-eyed?

One day, you came to school, and you told us that he kicked you.

Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son?

My dad would.

My dad's blue-eyed. He's never kicked me. Greg's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. Rex's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. Are you brown-eyed or blue-eyed?

Why are you shaking your head?

I don't know.

Are you sure that you're right? Why? What makes you so sure that you're right?

The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess, while the brown-eyed people have to stay in.

The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain. You'll have to use the paper cups. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. Well, the brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars, so that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are.

On page 127, 127-- is everyone ready? Everyone but Laurie. Ready Laurie?

She's a brown-eyed.

She's a brown-eyed. You'll begin to notice today that we spend a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people. The yard-stick's gone. Well, OK. I don't see the yard-stick. Do you?

It's over there.

Hey, Mrs. Elliott, better keep that on your desk, so if the brown-eyed people get out of hand--

Oh, you think if the brown-eyed people get out of hand, that would be the thing to use? Who goes first to lunch?

The blue-eyed people. No brown-eyed people go back for seconds. Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds. Brown-eyed people do not.

What about brown-eyed?

Don't you know?

They're not smart.

Is that the only reason?

We're afraid they'll take too much.

They might take too much.

OK, quiet, please.

And it seemed like, when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us.

The way they treated you, you felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything.

Seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us.

What happened at recess? Were two of you boys fighting?

Russell and John were.

What happened, John?

Russell called me names, and I hit him-- hit him in the gut.

What did he call you?

Brown eyes.

Did you call him brown eyes?

They always call us that. Greg, and all the blue eyes call us that.

They keep calling, brown eyes!

Come here brown eyes!

And they were calling us blue eyes.

I wasn't. Sandy and Donna were.

What's wrong with being called brown eyes?

It means that we're stupider-- well, not that, but--

Oh, that's just the same way as other people calling black people "niggers."

Is that the reason you hit him, John? Did it help? Did it stop him? Did it make you feel better inside? Make you feel better inside? It make you feel better to call him brown eyes? Why do you suppose you call him brown eyes?

Probably because he has brown eyes.

Is that the only reason? You didn't call him brown eyes yesterday, and he had brown eyes yesterday. Didn't he?

Because we just thought of it.

Yeah, ever since you put those blue things on their neck--

We tease them. We kind of tease them.

Oh, is this teasing?

No. Well, he did it once.

Were you doing it for fun, to be funny? Or were you doing it to be mean? I don't know. Don't ask me. Did anyone laugh at you, when you did it?

I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders, in a space of 15 minutes.

Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people. That wasn't true. I lied to you yesterday.

Oh, boy, here we go again.

The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.

Russell, where are your glasses?

I forgot them.

You forgot them. And what color are your eyes?

Susan Ginder has brown eyes. She didn't forget her glasses.

Russell Ring has blue eyes. And what about his glasses?

He forgot them.

He forgot them. Yesterday we were visiting, and Greg said, boy I like to hit my little sister as hard as I can. That's fun. What does that tell you about blue-eyed people?

They're naughty.

They fight a lot.

The brown-eyed people may take off their collars, and each of you may put your collar on a blue-eyed person.

Put down your hands.

The brown-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess. You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time. You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people. They are smarter than blue-eyed people. And if you don't believe it, look at Bryan. Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad, very, very sad.

Who can tell me what contraction should be in the first sentence? Go to the board, and write it, John. Come on. Let's do it again. Loosen up, up, up, up. Come on. That's better! Now, do you know how to make a W? OK, write the contraction for "we are." Now, that's beautiful writing. Is that better?

Brown-eyed people learn fast, don't they? Boy, do the brown-eyed people learn fast. Very good!

Greg, what did you do with that cup? Will you please go and get that cup, and put your name on it, and keep it at your desk. Blue-eyed people are wasteful.

OK, want to be timed this morning?

I use Orton-Gillingham phonics. We use the card pack. And the children-- the brown-eyed children-- were in the low class the first day, and it took them 5 and 1/2 minutes to get through the card pack. The second day, it took them 2 and 1/2 minutes. The only thing that had changed was the fact that now, they were superior people.

You went faster than I've ever had anyone go through the card pack.

Why couldn't you get them yesterday?

We were brown-eyed.

We had those collars on. And we--

You think the collars kept you from--

We kept thinking about those collars.

You kept going like this. And my eyes kept rolling around.

Oh, and you couldn't think as well with the collars on.

Four minutes and 18 seconds.

I knew we weren't gonna make it.

Neither did I.

How long did it take you yesterday?

Three minutes.

Three minutes. How long did it take you today?

What happened?

It went down.

Why? What were you thinking of?

I hate today.

How do you do? I hate it, too.

Because I'm blue-eyed.

See, I am, too.

It's not funny. It's not fun. It's not pleasant. This is a filthy, nasty word called discrimination. We're treating people a certain way, because they are different from the rest of us. Is that fair?

Nothing fair about it. We didn't say this was going to be a fair day, did we?

And it isn't. It's a horrid day.

Are you ready? What did you blue-- people who are wearing blue collars now, find out today?

I know what they felt like yesterday.

I did, too. Eww!

How did they feel yesterday?

Like a dog on a leash.

It feels like a chain wherever you go.

--in the prison, like you're chained up in the prison, and you're throwing the key away.

Should the color of some other person's eyes have anything to do with how you treat them?

All right, then should the color of their skin?

Should you judge people by the color of their skin?

You're going to say that today, and this week, and probably all the time you're in this room. You'll say, No, Mrs. Elliott, every time I ask that question. Then, when you see a black man, or an Indian, or someone walking down the street, are you going to say, ha ha! Look at that silly-looking thing.

Does it make any difference whether their skin is black, or white, or yellow, or red? Is that how you decide whether people are good or bad? Is that what makes people good or bad?

Let's take these collars off.

Hey, don't get sticky stuff on it.

Here, Mrs. Elliott. You can have it.

What would you like to do with them?

Throw them away!

Now you know a little bit more than you knew at the beginning of this week.

Do you know a little bit more than you wanted to?

Yes, Mrs. Elliott!

This isn't an easy way to learn this. Is it?

No, Mrs. Elliott!

Oh, will you stop that?

OK, now let's all sit down here together, blue eyes and brown eyes. Does it make any difference what color you are?

Down, girl.

Not up, down.

Oh-ho! You found your friend, huh?

We're friends again!

OK, are you ready to listen up? OK, now are you back.

That feel better?

Does the color of eyes that you have make any difference in the kind of person you are?

Does that feel like being home again, girls?

Oh, will you stop it!

This was the third time Jane Elliott had taught her lesson in discrimination. The first, two years earlier, was in April of 1968. On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, one of my students came into the room and said, they shot a king last night, Mrs. Elliott. Why'd they shoot that king? I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it. Because we had talked about racism since the first day of school. But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away. There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.

As I listened to the white male commentators on TV the night before, I was hearing things like, who's going to hold your people together? As they interview black leaders. What are they going to do? Who's going to control your people? As though this was-- these people were subhuman, and someone was going to have to step in there and control them.

They said things like, when we lost our leader, his widow helped to hold us together. Who's going to hold them together? And the attitude was so arrogant, and so condescending, and so ungodly, that I thought if white male adults react this way, what are my third graders going to do? How are they going to react to this thing?

I was ironing the teepee. We studied an Indian unit. We made a teepee every year. The first year, the students would make the teepee out of pieces of sheet. We'd sew it together. And the next year, we'd decorate it with Indian symbols.

I was ironing the previous year's teepee, getting it ready to be decorated the next day. And I thought of what we had done with the Indians. We haven't made much progress in these 200, 300 years. And I thought, this is the time now to teach them, really, what the Sioux Indian prayer that says, oh, Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man, until I have walked in his moccasins, really means.

And for the next day, I knew that my children were going to walk in someone else's moccasins for a day. Like it or lump it, they were going to have to walk in someone else's moccasins. I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used.

So the next day, I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color and immediately created a microcosm of society in a third grade classroom.

Riceville hasn't changed much in the 17 years since then. It's still a small farming community, surrounded by corn fields. Its population is still under 1,000. And it's still all white and all Christian. And though Jane Elliott has continued to teach her lesson in discrimination, there has been little outward local reaction, no objections from school authorities or the parents of the 300-odd students who have, by now, been through it.

OK, let's get in a circle.

The reunion of her former third graders was Jane Elliott's first chance to find out how much of her lessons her students had retained.

All right, now, Raymond, why-- I want to know why you were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids? At the end of the day, I thought, the miserable little Nazi.

Really, I just-- I couldn't stand you.

It felt tremendously evil. You could-- all your inhibitions were gone, and no matter if they were my friends or not, any pent-up hostilities or aggressions that these kids had ever caused you, you had a chance to get it all out.

I felt like I was a king, like I ruled them brown eyes, like I was better than them, happy.

And you did it all day.

How did you feel when you were the out group?

Boy, that day, after we went home, woo hoo. Talk about hating somebody. It was there.

You hated me?

Yeah, of what you were putting us through. Nobody likes to be looked down upon. Nobody likes to be hated, teased, or discriminated against. And it just boggles up inside of you. You just get so mad.

Were you just angry, or was there more than that?

I felt demoralized, humiliated.

Is the learning worth the agony?

It made everything a lot different than what it was. You-- we was a lot better family, all togeth-- even in our houses, we was probably. Because it was hard on you. When you have your best friend one day, and then he's your enemy the next, it brings it out real, real quick in you.

Some of the remarks were the kinds of things I would have wished I could have programmed into them. If I had been able to program them, they're the things I would have wanted them to say. Some of the things were just mind-blowing.

You know, you hear these people talking about different people, and how they're, you know, they're different. And they'd like to have them out of the country. I wish they'd go back to Africa, you know, and stuff. 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 what I went-- you know, do what I went through.

We was at a softball game a couple weekends ago. And there was a black yelling, hi, Verla, you know. And we hugged each other and everything. And some people really looked just like, what are you doing with him? You know. And you just get this burning feeling, sensation, and you just want to let it out, and put them through what we went through to find out they're not any different.

I still find myself, sometimes, when I see some people together, and I see how they act, you know, I think, well that's black. And then right in the next second, I don't even finish the thought, I'm saying, well, I've seen whites do it. I've seen other people do it. It's not just the blacks. It's-- everyone acts differently. It's just the different color is what hits you first. And then later-- as I said, I don't even finish that thought before I remember back when I was like that, and I remember, not, you know-- everyone acts the same way. It's just your way of thinking is the difference.

Like when my grandparents or somebody, and they start talking about old times, and they say the Japs, and all this and that, and they start, you know, holding that against them. I think how would you like to have been them? Japanese Americans getting thrown into this camp, just because they happen to be part Japanese. You know, I just-- calm down and think about it. But when they get older, they're set in their ways. And that's not going to change.

When you get older?

I'll be set in my ways, but they're different than their ways. When people--

I was absolutely enthralled. Sandy Dohlman's statements that, when my son comes home with the word nigger and the other things that he hears downtown, I say to him, listen, that isn't the way we judge people. You don't judge people by how they look. You judge them by what's on their inside, not their outside.

I'm glad that she's teaching him not to hate. Because even though he does hear this from the other people, if he goes home, and he thinks, well, Mom and Dad like the black people, I'm going to like them, too. So I don't think he's going to pick nothing bad out of it.

You chose your husband well.

He chose me.

You chose her well.

Little kids will take in-- you know, they'll listen to a lot of other people, too. So they're going to end up, kind of, confused over it.

But if she keeps on telling him, is he going to be the kind of person you kids are, or is he going to be the kind who'll judge people by the color of their skin?

Well, he'll know right-- somewhat right from wrong. He'll know that he won't--

--but he'll have the ideas. He won't be judging them by their color, but he won't know what we know fully, having been through it.

He won't learn--

--the collar thing.

--the prejudice from us.

He won't learn prejudice first-handed.

Yeah. He won't learn to be prejudiced from us. I mean, they won't learn to discriminate between people from us. He might hear it from others, but never from us.

OK, what's it like to be married to somebody like that?

When I was going to marry Sheila, and I knew for my future that I was going into the military. At first, I thought, is she going to be able to handle being with all the different nationalities? And then I read The Storm-- read the book--

A Class Divided.

--The Class Divided before we got married, and before I joined the army. And I said, hey, she's not going to have any problems.

Should every child have the exercise, or should every teacher?

Everybody, not just--

I think every school ought to implement something like this program in their early stages of education.

If Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination changed the way these young people feel about discrimination and racism, it also had a totally unexpected result.

The second year I did this exercise, I gave little spelling tests, math tests, reading tests, two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise, and two weeks later. And almost without exception, the students' scores go up on the day they're on the top, down on the day they're on the bottom, and then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after they've been through the exercise.

We've sent some of those tests to Stanford University, to the psychology department. And they did a sort of an informal review of them. And they said that what's happening here is kids' academic ability is being changed in a 24-hour period. And that isn't possible, but it's happening. Something very strange is happening to these children, because suddenly, they're finding out how really great they are, and they are responding to what they know now they're able to do. And it has happened consistently with third graders.

The film made of Jane Elliott's third graders in 1970 has been widely used with students and teachers, and by government, business, and labor organizations concerned about human relations. Perhaps the most unusual use of it is here, at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Stormville, New York.

Here, in a sociology course taught by Professor Duane W. Smith of Dutchess Community College, his almost exclusively black and Hispanic classes have been seeing the film for more than 10 years.

What I'd like to do is introduce the subject of prejudice and discrimination through this film called The Eye of the Storm.

Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. They are cleaner than brown-eyed people. They are more civilized than brown-eyed people.

Sandra and her brown-eyed friends didn't like that day. But Raymond did.

I felt like I was a king, like a--

Do you think the children, by this process, really learned the meaning of discrimination?

Most of the children, before the film started, they had played and lived together in harmony. And the certain actions coming from the teacher, and seeing the teacher as an authoritarian figure and someone to respect, they accepted the views that was being given to them. But I think at the end of the lesson, they could clearly see that prejudices and other forms of discrimination are things that people deal with in their minds, that they're not actually physical barriers that say, yo, you can't cross the street.

The one kid I could really agree with was at recess. He was a brown-eyed kid. He had this inner turmoil against this feeling of being divided or prejudiced against, where he would hit another kid, that he's known for so many years, in the gut. Whether-- he also stated that it didn't help any. So that automatically should be a lesson to every adult in the world. Violence doesn't help any. And you know, this is a film that I hope that my children get to see.

Unlike New York, Iowa is 98% white Anglo-Saxon. Yet even here, minority groups account for more than 20% of the prison population. To make sure its prison system employees are sensitive to the concerns of this large minority, the Iowa Department of Corrections last fall hired Jane Elliott to give her lesson to some of them. The group, which included prison guards and parole officers, was told only that it would be attending a day-long workshop. David Stokesberry--

Most of our training we go to, people give you information, and you learn that way.

When I first came with the sign up and such and got put in the group, I didn't know-- when I started seeing the signs around, brown eyes only and such, I figured they were the better group, because they had a lot of spaces available, and there were none for the blue eyes.

So when I got put in the blue eyes group, and put the collar on, then I knew well, then I was going to be in the deprived group, I guess.

OK, now you can stay in this area.

The workshop was supposed to begin at 9:00. They took the brown eyes in about 9:00, and then left us standing in the hall.

I literally stood, because there weren't enough chairs. And I didn't know whether or not I wanted to try to take a chair down, I didn't know if somebody would come take the chair away from me if I did.

While David Stokesberry and the other blue-eyed people waited, inside the meeting room, Jane Elliott prepared the brown-eyed people for what was going to happen.

Now, this is not something I can do alone. This exercise won't work without your cooperation. Blue-eyed people aren't allowed to smoke. Blue-eyed people aren't allowed to sit in these empty chairs. Do not let a blue-eyed person sit next to you. You know you can't trust them. And besides which, they don't smell good. Everybody knows that about blue-eyed people. You don't know what you can catch from a blue-eyed person.

By 9:20, I felt some antagonism. You know, I'm stuck out here for 20 minutes, standing, waiting.

I still say we ought to see what kind of reaction we'd get by everyone just simply going in. No one wants to do it?

But he seems to have courage and a conviction to do a lot of talking.

[INAUDIBLE]

Oppose it all by singing a song and doing something really loud, you know--

"We Shall Overcome?"

Yeah. Right?

We need to have you keep it down. I don't know how many times I need to give that instruction. But you need to keep it down, so you don't bother the people in the workshop.

I was pretty well ticked off by the time we got taken in there.

Purses and overcoats in the corner here. I need to have your put your purse and your coat in the corner. Purse and coat in the corner. Purses and overcoats in the corner.

It would be to your advantage in the future, people, if you'd get to meetings on time. And it would also be to your advantage if you'd put your gum away.

I'll leave.

Put your gum away.

Do you want to get paid for today?

Well, then stay, but put your gum away.

Well, I don't have a purse, so I don't have a place to put my gum.

I'm sure that you are inventive enough to find a place for the gum. Now, I'd like for you to notice where she put her gum. You have this problem with blue-eyed people. You give them something decent and they just wreck it. You'll also notice that blue-eyed people spend a lot of time playing, look at me, see how cute I am. I can be funny. I can make a joke of this. This is amusing. I'm amused by this. Another thing that is obvious about blue-eyed people is that they're poor listeners.

The first thing you have to do when you're teaching in a segregated situation, when you're working in a segregated situation, is teach the listening skills. The listening skills are, number one, good listeners have quiet hands, feet, and mouths. Everyone needs to write these down.

I'd like for you to look at the man in the back, in the black jacket. The game we're playing is, playing it cool. This is a favorite blue-eyed game, playing it cool. Nobody can bother me, man. I can handle this. I don't have to do this. I'm going to ignore this whole thing.

Number two, good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking. I take it you don't have a pencil. Nor you?

Perhaps you could borrow one from one of your neighbors. Sir, I realize that you feel that you don't need to write it down. But whether or not you write it down, perhaps you could remember it. Good listeners have quiet hands, feet, and mouths. Do you know what that means?

I'm not sure.

I believe that. Do you want me to explain it to you?

That's OK. I'll get a pencil and write this down directly.

Look, blue-eyed people, many of you have pencils. Will one of you please lend him a pencil? Or don't you trust him? Which I can understand. From the last 10 minutes, what have you observed about blue-eyed people?

Blue-eyed people are very stubborn, very self-centered, and wish to control as much of their surrounding as possible, people-wise, I mean. Very inconsiderate people. I don't even know why you have them here in the first place.

We have them here, because we are required to have them here.

We have to, huh?

This is one of the things you have to put up with.

Number three, good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end. OK. Good listeners decide to learn something. And this is the thing you'll have the most difficulty with with blue-eyed people. They decide not to learn something. Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your home environment. Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your workplace. Does anybody have an example of that that they'd like to talk about? Anyone?

I have two nephews and one blue-eyed and one's brown-eyed. And the blue-eyed one, he never cleans his room. and he's real lazy. And he doesn't seem to have a lot of energy, the blue-eyed one. But the brown-eyed one, he's real outgoing and he's plays in sports and he's pretty good at it. He just seems like a better kid. So if I have kids, I hope they have brown eyes.

Are you married?

Then, it's a good thing you don't have kids, isn't it.

Well you will know what to do when you choose a mate.

Would you like to read that first listening skill to me?

I haven't got it on my paper yet.

Oh. Why is that? I haven't borrowed the pencil to write it down as yet.

Do you think it's unnecessary?

At this particular point, yes, I do.

I have it in my head, for the most part.

There's a lot of space up there for it, isn't there friend? Do you suppose you could tell me what it is?

It has something to do with keeping your hands and feet still.

Has something to do with that.

I find it interesting that you're amused by our having to stand here and wait for this man to do something that everybody else has already done. I find that highly interesting. Stupid, but interesting. If you are in a situation where someone is constantly, constantly refusing to do what the people in authority ask them to do, what do you know about them? What you do about that person?

Well, think it's a game with them, attention.

Has it gained anything for this gentleman?

Disrespect from, I think, the brown-eyed people.

Has it proven anything to brown-eyed people?

Yes, that this is a typical trait of a blue-eyed person.

Now, read the second one.

I don't have the second one. Can I read it off hers?

You don't have the second one either? You were keeping it in your head. What happened to that plan?

Just the first one I had in my head, not the second one.

The other three aren't important?

Well, they're probably important.

But not important enough for you to write down, right?

Well, they're important. I should've written them down, most probably.

Most probably? Does anybody back there know? You don't have it written down either? I want you to take a look at these two so-called gentlemen. Now, we need to hear the good listening skills from you. I don't want you to think that I'm badgering you boys. But on the other hand--

I don't think that.

On the other hand, you are here to learn something. And if you learn nothing else today, it would be nice if you would learn the listening skills. What do you know now about blue-eyed people that you didn't know before you came in here?

I'm finding I'm going to have to explain things a bit more explicitly to a blue-eyed person than I would to a brown-eyed person.

How many times did I have to repeat the listening skills for Roger? Well, probably Roger is having a rough time today, isn't he. It was about six or seven different times.

You think that's amusing, Roger?

Apparently, somewhat amusing.

As part of the lesson, the Corrections Department employees took a written test.

All right. I need these names and the scores.

I have KR 11.

I'm sorry. I can't hear you.

KR, just initials. 11.

Just KR? Just an initial? No last name?

11. And Churdon or Charles, I'm not sure.

Thank you, sir.

Tell me the name again.

You can't read the name.

No. I can't. Can't make it out.

It's probably mine.

What's your name?

My name is Chambers.

First name?

And what was her score?

E. Riley with a 5.

Will E. Riley please stand?

That's mine.

You know, what you do to the image of blues with your behavior is unfortunate. What you three people do to the image of women with your behavior really makes me angry. The fact that you do this kind of thing and this kind of sloppy work reflects badly on women. I resent that doubly. Yes?

Ma'am, I'd really appreciate it if you'd call us by name when you say, you three people we don't know who you're speaking to. It could be anyone here.

My dear, if you wanted me to call you by name, you'd've put your name on your paper.

It's on my--

It was to be on your paper.

You didn't see my papers, ma'am. I didn't get your name either, because it wasn't on your paper.

That's right.

All right. Now, how can one call you by your name, if you don't care enough about your name to put it on your paper? Don't expect me to worry about it. Don't expect me to worry about it, if you don't put it on your paper. Don't sit here and say my name is important to me, after you have just deliberately not put it on your paper. You're being totally unrealistic.

I don't remember saying my name was important to me. I remember saying, I like to know who you're speaking to when you say, you three.

Then, what should you do?

Ask you to use my name, which I did.

And where should your name have been?

Right where it is.

On your paper?

And on my birth certificate.

Is it on your paper?

Where'd you get a birth certificate?

Same place you got yours.

Out of a slot machine. Same as you did, lady.

I think you're probably right about your own.

Least I know who my parents are, ma'am.

Is she being rude?

Is she being inconsiderate?

Is she being uncooperative?

Is she being insulting?

Yes. Are those the things that we've accused blue-eyed people of being?

Is she proving that we're right?

Does anyone have any comments to make at this point?

Do you feel that there are important blue-eyed people?

There are exceptions to every rule.

And what are those exceptions?

There are a few important blue-eyed people.

You said that.

Do you think that you're one of them?

That's good.

Then, why are you up there then?

I'm blue-eyed. The difference between you and me is I have a brown-eyed husband and brown-eyed offspring. And I've learned how to behave in a brown-eyed society. And when you can act brown enough, then you, too, can be where I am.

I wouldn't want to be where you are.

Are you certain?

Absolutely positive.

You like where you are?

I love where I am.

You like it so much that you don't even identify yourself on your paper?

I don't need to, lady.

Her using the term lady where I'm concerned, what do you think she's trying to do? Is it ignorance or is it deliberately insulting?

I would say it was deliberately insulting.

If it's ignorance, she needs to be taught that to many of us, the word lady is a pejorative. I don't appreciate it. It's a put-down. And it's used to keep women in their place.

I will call you by the correct name.

I will call you by a correct name after this. I won't be kind.

That was kindness on your part?

Then, you are--

I think calling someone a lady is a kindness.

Then, your problem is ignorance.

You can call me lady anytime you like.

I wouldn't do that to you.

No. I know you wouldn't.

I really wouldn't. And that's part of the problem, is a total lack of awareness at what sexism amounts to and how much you contribute to the sexism that keeps you where you are.

I like where I am, lady. I did it again, didn't I?

I'm getting kind of fed up with this whole bunch of garbage.

Brown-eyed peoples are no different than we are. I hate to tell them that. They have these false delusions and such.

Are they being disruptive?

No. You trained them very well. I think that's what they did with the stormtroopers in Germany also. You guys do a real good job sitting out there.

You think that what's happening here today feels like it would have felt in Nazi Germany?

Where do you think you are in that, then?

Where do I think I am?

Who are you, if you're in Nazi Germany? Who are you?

After a break for lunch, Jane Elliott helped the Corrections Department employees analyze what had happened.

Did you learn anything this morning?

I think I learned from the experience of feeling like I was in a glass cage I was powerless. There was a sense of hopelessness. I was angry. I wanted to speak up and yet, at times, I knew if I spoke up, I'd be back in a powerless situation. I'd be attacked. A sense of hopelessness, oppression.

Had you experienced that before?

I realized this morning that there were very few times in my life that I've ever been discriminated against, very few.

And you were this uncomfortable in an hour and a half?

I was amazed at how uncomfortable I was in the first 15 minutes.

Can you empathize at all, then, with blacks, minority group members in this country?

I'm hoping better than before.

We tried to argue with you, you would use just the mere argument as reason for us being lesser than the brown-eyed folks. You know, you couldn't win.

Yeah. Don't we do that every day?

I think some do, yeah. But I would hope that I never get so unreasonable. You know, the statements you were making were groundless and such. And yet, we couldn't argue with them, because if we argued, then we were argumentative and not listening and getting out of our place and all that stuff. And that was frustrating to me. And then, frustrating to me was the other little green tags who were sitting on their hands. My group here was, I didn't think, boisterous enough in our opposition to the whole thing.

Why didn't you people support one another? Why didn't the blue-eyed people-- the blue-eyed people on this side, just sat there. And let's face it, you covered your asses. Right? Why did you just sit there?

Well, I think that's symptomatic of the problem as a whole. We see that in society in general, we see a few people who are making a lot of noise. And the rest of the people sitting back, waiting to see what they're going to do.

OK. As long as I was picking on him, I was leaving you alone, right?

I'd say a lot of people accept that. They let a few people do their fighting for them And they stand back. and if this person's gonna to win, then they'll get on this side. If that person's not gonna win, they'll stay back over here, you know? That's just how it works.

If you were in a real situation where you had to do something about racism, would you stand up and be counted?

What I would do, I don't know. It would depend on--

But you would do something?

I would have to do something. I couldn't go home tonight and face my kids if I didn't.

How did you brown-eyed people feel while this was going on?

Embarrassed.

A sense of relief that I wasn't a blue-eyed person.

Sense of relief that you had the right color eyes? Absolutely.

I really understood, at least I felt that I understood, what it was like to be in the minority.

Why were you angry?

First of all, because it was unreasonable. Secondly, because I felt discriminated against. Thirdly, I think that all of us, everyone in this room, has dealt with discrimination on both sides. You don't have to be black or Jewish or Mexican, or anything else to have felt discrimination in your life.

And as you become an adult, you learn to deal with those feelings within yourself. You learn to handle those. And when you feel yourself in a situation that you can't get out of, which we couldn't, we were a captive audience. And it was not a normal situation, because normally you aren't badgered.

What if you had to spend the rest of your life this way?

I don't know how to answer that.

You don't wake up every morning knowing that you're different. You wake up as a white woman who is going to her job at 8:00 or whatever, where a black person is going to wake up knowing from the minute they get up out of the bed and look in the mirror, they're black. And they have to deal with the problems they've had to deal with ever since they were young and realize that I am different and I have to deal with life differently. Things are different for me.

And I don't think you can really say that you have felt-- maybe you have felt some sort of discrimination. But you haven't felt what it is like for a black woman to go through the daily experiences of arguing and saying, listen to me. My point of view is good. What I have to offer here is good. And no one wants to listen, because white is right. That's the way things are.

I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime. No. I don't want to see it used more widely. I want to see the necessity for it wiped out. And I think if educators were determined, that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise.

But I want to see something used. I'd like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not with all students, unless it's done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way. I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily. And I would never suggest that everybody should use it.

I think you could have training classes for teachers, bring them in, put them through the thing, explain what happened, do the debriefing, and then practice doing this until a group of teachers were able to do it on their own. And teachers are not disabled learners. They could learn to do this, obviously. If I can do it, most anyone can do it. It doesn't take a super teacher to do this exercise.

What began in a third grade classroom has spread, from students to teachers to corrections officers. At the center is still a single teacher, determined to inoculate her students, both young and old, against the virus of bigotry.

After you do this exercise, when the debriefing starts, when the pain is over and you're all back together and you're all one again, 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. I thought maybe that lasted just while they were in my classroom, because of my superior influence. But indeed, these kids still feel that way about one another. They said yesterday-- over and over, the remark was made-- 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 that way again. And they said, we're kind of like a family now. And indeed we were.

It takes time to build trust, time to find out what's true, time to make up your mind. It takes time to tell the stories that matter. Frontline.

To order Frontline's A Class Divided on DVD or VHS, call PBS Home Video at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Please note that this video contains dehumanizing language. We have chosen to include it in order to honestly communicate the harmful language of the time; however, dehumanizing language should not be spoken aloud during class.

Supporting Materials

• document Spanish Transcript - A Class Divided

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We Are Repeating The Discrimination Experiment Every Day, Says Educator Jane Elliott

• Martin Luther King Jr
• racial justice

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ."

As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed.

She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people.

More than 50 years after she first tried that exercise in her classroom, Elliott, now 87, said she sees much more work left to do to change racist attitudes. The May 25 killing of George Floyd set off weeks of nationwide protests over the police abuse and racism against black people, plunging the U.S. into a reckoning of racial inequality.

"It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition . "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis."

When Elliott first conducted the exercise in 1968, brown-eyed students were given special privileges. She said she watched and was horrified at what she saw.

The students started to internalize, and accept, the characteristics they'd been arbitrarily assigned based on the color of their eyes.

Elliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight.

"She said, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, 'I don't know why you're doing that — I thought it was about time somebody shot that son of a bitch,' " she said. "Not one of them reprimanded her for that or even corrected her. They all either smiled or laughed and nodded."

The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch.

"No person of any age [was] going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said.

Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country.

Still, Elliott said the last few years have brought out America's worst racist tendencies. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said.

"People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. "Probably because they have been taught how they're treated in this country — that they have to understand us. [White people] on the other hand, don't have to understand them. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily."

But the protests happening now have given her hope.

"Things are changing, and they're going to change rapidly if we're very, very fortunate," she said. "If this ugly change, if this negative change can happen this quickly, why can't positive change happen that quickly? I think it can."

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