Blue eyed people are smarter than brown eyed people.
They are cleaner than brown eyed people.
They are more civilized than brown eyed people.
This is what a 3rd grade teacher told her class.
The year is 1968 and its the day after Martin Luther King was killed.
The teacher, Jane Elliot, was so frustrated with how the media was reacting to the death
of Martin Luther King.
Using us vs them phases.
Acting as though African Americans were separate from everybody else.
Her class had recently named Martin Luther King as their hero of the month and as her
class started that day a boy asked a question "Why did they kill that King"?
To immunize them against discrimination.Elliot suggested an activity.
The activity was to last for 2 days.
She divided the class into 2 groups.
Blue eyed and brown eyed students.
Blue eyed students got 5 mins extra recess.
Brown eyed students could not play on the play equipment.
Blue eyed students could have seconds.
Brown eyed students could not.
Blue eyed students could drink directly from the water fountain.
Brown eyed student had to use drinking cups.
Brown eyed students were not allowed to play with blue eyed students.
Brown eyed student had to wear collars so you could at a distance what color they were.
If a brown eyed student was slow or forgot something Elliot would draw attention to it
and note that they were brown eyed.
She said things like "you will begin to notice today that we spend a lot of time waiting
for brown eyed people".
Student behavior started to change.
One blue eyed boy suggested that Elliot keep a stick handy just in case the brown eyed
students started to make trouble.
One of the students explained that brown eyed students dont get seconds because they are
not smart enough and they may take too much food.
One boy punched another boy in the play ground because they called him brown eyes.
They blue eyed students said they felt like kings, like rulers, that they had an opportunity
to extract pain on others.
The brown eyed students felt like they were on the bottom.
Ever thing bad was happening to them.
That there was no point doing anything.
That the teacher was taking their best friends away from them.
They felt like they were in prison.
Like they were a dog on a leash.
On the second day Elliot reversed it.
She explained to the class that she had made a mistake and actually brown eyed students
were smarter than blue eyed students and brown eyed students were cleaner than blue eyed
students.
She started to draw attention to mistakes made by blue eyed people.
She would point out that brown eyed people were learning faster than blue eyed people.
It started to affect their academic performance.
On day one the brown eyed people took 5.5 mins to finish the card deck.
On day two it only took 2.5 mins.
For the blue eyed students it took only 3 mins on the first day and on the second day
almost 4.5 mins.
The academic performance of the discriminated group dropped consistently.
At the end of the two days they ended the experiment.
Friends returned to each other and they removed their collars.
The experiment received a lot of media coverage and Elliot was invited to appear on the Johnny
Carson show.
There was a HUGE reaction to her interview and much of it was negative.
One person actually wrote in and said "How dare you do this cruel experiment on WHITE
children.
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”.
Elliot repeated this experiment each year.
In 1970 a documentary was made, The Eye of the Storm, and that was widely shared.
15 years later, a follow up - A Class Divided, was produced which reunited the 1970 class.
In the mid 1980s Elliot left her teaching role and devoted herself to full-time diversity
training.
• She is considered an anti-racism activist and diversity educator.
She redeveloped the experiment not for children but for adults.
Shes used it in the prison system and in politics to teach adults about diversity.
Several academic studies have reviewed Elliot's experiments with mixed results.
Concern has been raised about the high levels of stress the participants feel during the
experiment.
Now, 50 years after the 1st experiment we still live in a divided world.
Much of the division is on ethnic lines.
Movements like Black Lives Matter and the rise of protectist xenophobic politics in
NA, Europe and my home country Australia indicate that judging people based on appearance is
still a huge thing.
Do you believe you would have behaved differently if you were in the experiment and you were
told that you were special and the others were dirty?
I hope I would but I don't know.
The only needed for EVIL to prosper is for good people to do NOTHING.
I hope you found this thought provoking.
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