Two years later, a BBC documentary captured the experiment in Elliott's classroom. "No person of any age going to leave my presence with those attitudes unchallenged," Elliott said. She decided to continue the exercise with her students after lunch. The interaction only strengthened Elliott's resolve. ![]() They all either smiled or laughed and nodded." "Not one of them reprimanded her for that or even corrected her. 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. "She said, on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. One teacher ended up displaying the same bigotry Elliott had spent the morning trying to fight. At her lunch break that day in the teacher's lounge, she told her colleagues about the exercise. "We are repeating the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise on a daily basis."Īmerica Reckons With Racial Injustice 'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About RaceĮlliott started to see her own white privilege, even her own ignorance. "It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition. 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. 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. Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. Elliott split her students into two groups, based on eye color. She wanted them to understand what discrimination felt like. ![]() ![]() in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise."Īs 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. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images 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.
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