There is only one race on the face of the earth and that is the human race’ – Jane Elliott
“Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” Experiment in Anti-Racism
On April 5th, 1968, a school teacher from Iowa called Jane Elliot tried a social experiment by teaching her 3rd Grade class about the problems of racism by showing them how it felt. She did this by segregating the blue-eyed children and the brown-eyed children each day to see how they would react to the situation.
Elliot started this experiment by asking her class who they should treat as brothers or equals and they replied everyone; however, when she asked her class who didn’t deserve to be treated as brothers, the class said that members of the Black and Indian community, shouldn’t have this connection with the Caucasian society. When asking the class what black people have a right to, one of the young boys said ‘nothing’ as they have been told that this is true by society. Therefore, showing that the children have been indoctrinated by racism passed down from their parents and the time they are living in with people not getting reprimanded for their actions against people; that the Black Lives Matter movement is currently trying to eradicate.
This experiment started on a Tuesday when Elliot told her class that to help them understand what people with different coloured skin have to go through she was going to segregate them. She started by making the brown-eyed students wear a collar around their necks so they can tell them apart from further away and then gave them restrictions from the blue-eyed students, such as they get to have lunch first. While in the middle of the lesson the teacher askes the students where the yardstick is to help with the lesson and one of the blue-eyed students says ‘Mrs. Elliot, you better keep that on your desk, if the brown-eyed people get out of hand.’ The comment made shows that children in the late 1960s have been taught that if a lower class gets out of hand in their eyes then it is okay to beat them and use physical violence. After the children’s break time, they come back in and explained how two of the children got into a fight because the blue-eyed kid called the other child ‘brown-eyes’ and so he punched him in the stomach as he was upset about it as he was told that being like that is wrong. This is not only happening in this social experiment with 9-year olds but people of all ages in the real world where people can cause harm like with the officers who killed George Floyd and the countless other black lives that have been killed unprovoked like Brianna Taylor. Mrs. Elliot ends the first day of this experiment saying how she usually saw the students as kind, respectful children, whereas they changed and turned sour and bitter towards each other as one group of children were superior to the other.
The next day the students switched to the brown-eyed students being higher and the blue-eyed students being made to wear the collar to be subjected to a lower class for the day. The teacher played a card game with the two groups each day and this showed how oppression can affect someone’s effort and willingness to participate as it took the brown-eyed group five and a half minutes on Tuesday yet on Wednesday it only took them two and a half minutes when they were in the superordinate as they don’t have the dragging weight of people pulling you down and similar results came out for the blue-eyes group with them doing better when they weren’t being oppressed. The teacher at the end of the day explained to the students how discrimination is awful as it has people being treated differently just because of something they can’t change about themselves and shouldn’t need to. After this experiment, Mrs. Elliot asked the students how they felt about their past two days of being treated like a second-rate citizen and they harrowingly described it as: ‘like a dog on a leach’ and also ‘as if they had been chained up in prison with the key being thrown away’ and this is a hurtful thing that is still happening in 2020 in what people are experiencing currently throughout the world. Furthermore, when at the end of the day Mrs. Elliot asked the children if they have learned anything they explained that they wouldn’t judge a person by how they looked as that doesn’t define someone.
On June 2nd, 2020, Jane Elliot went on Jimmy Fallon to speak about her experiment over 52 years later. She says how she did this experiment the day after the death of Martin Luther King Jr as she was so upset that in February he was named one of the greatest men alive and yet in April he was killed by an assassin with a firearm; showing that people are not willing to move forward with acceptance. She says there are no white people and the only people who are, are Albinos and they are also getting killed in Tanzania and yet we are showing that we are against it yet this happens in the USA for other races, and in both cases the killers are not held accountable for their actions because the marginalised group is not defended and justice is not dispensed. Jane Elliot says that people who say ‘I don’t see you as black’ are lying because you are claiming that you don’t see the largest organ on the human body of someone and if you don’t see them as the person they are as their skin makes them who they are. This experiment got a lot of backlash for her and her family as none of her friends or teachers in her school would talk to her. Then her parents lost their jobs and her children faced physical and verbal abuse from all faculty at the school ‘because they had an n-word lover for a mother’. This is disgusting as she was just doing her job of educating the younger generation to be the people of tomorrow not stuck in the world of yesterday.
Overall, this social experiment was very ahead of its time as it shows what Caucasian people should experience to learn about how the black community has to live their life. As Jane Elliot said to fix this problem we need to educate ourselves and learn about not only our history but everyone’s and realise the people who should be famous but were oppressed by the racism of our world. So, to educate yourself read articles, watch documentaries, or talk to someone who has had different experiences than you.