Blue eyes, brown eyes - learning the roots of prejudice

We are all cousins, says teacher who first led this exercise with third-graders in 1968

Jeferson Gomes/Pexels

I spent many years after observing the first post-war elections in Bosnia in 1996, trying to understand how and why the devastation - to people, buildings and communities - had come to pass. I learned a lot about the history of eastern Europe that I had not known. That area was long walled off from us by the Iron Curtain Stalin drew down over that part of the world.

It was not easy to have conversations with people who lived in the former Yugoslavia about how the terrible Bosnian war of 1992-5 had come to pass. I think it must be like trying to talk with people in Rwanda about what happened there during its dreadful genocide. 

It is both very complicated, and very simple.

Asked to think back to the very beginnings of the Bosnian conflict, one person said he had seen two things happen. Firstly, people began to identify other people by their ethnicity - Serb, Croat, Bosniak - rather than Yugoslav. Secondly, people began to sing old patriotic songs as they waited for the train.

Labelling people is the first step towards dehumanizing them. And that makes possible all kinds of horrible things, as we have seen throughout history.

While it may be difficult for people in North America to imagine how this happened in faraway countries, there is a North American example of how sadly easy it can be to demonize others. That is an experiment in 1968 in a rural third-grade classroom that changed the lives of both the teacher and the students. Jane Elliott has since spent years doing diversity training, in some unlikely places - think the Oprah show, for example. But her message about prejudice and its effects remains a lightning rod in many places.

She was speaking in Arizona in 2017 as part of Arizona State University’s Project Humanities campaign, and the Arizona Republic wrote a long story about it, entitled Blue eyes, brown eyes: What Jane Elliott's famous experiment says about race 50 years on.

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

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

“We need to fix this,” she says.

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

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

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

Which means, she says, it can be unlearned.

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

All these years later, Elliott hasn't stopped talking about what she learned. She thinks her message is more important than ever amid growing conflict over race.”

The plain-speaking Elliott taught third grade at a school in Riceville, Iowa, a town of 840 in rural northern Iowa. 

Dr. King had been their "Hero of the Month" the previous February, and the 28 children couldn't understand why he had been murdered. Jane herself had been shocked by news coverage of the assassination.

”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 interviewed black leaders,” she told Frontline PBS in 1985. “As though …these people were subhuman and someone was going to have to step in there and control them…..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?”

So she decided that, during National Brotherhood Week,  it was time to deal with racism concretely and in ways that third graders in Riceville could understand. “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.”

The experiment was simple. She separated blue-eyed children from the children with brown and green eyes and gave them green construction paper armbands to wear. Then she told them that the brown-eyed students were smarter, because they had more melanin. That meant they got privileges and were treated as superior to the blue-eyed.

“The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kid. The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent. The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.”

After the exercise, she asked her students to write about what they had learned, and their essays ran in the Riceville Recorder under the headline, “How Discrimination Feels.” The Associated Press did a follow-up story. Johnny Carson invited her to be on his show. 

She didn’t know how the experiment would turn out. In fact, she told Jimmy Fallon in 2020, “if I had known how it would work, I probably wouldn’t have done it.” She lost all her friends. Other teachers wouldn’t speak to her. Her parents lost their business. Her children were spit on, their belongings destroyed, and they were physically and verbally abused by other children, their parents and other teachers. She got death threats.

But she did the exercise in Riceville for nine more years in her third-grade class and another eight years with her seventh- and eighth-grade students, saying it helped develop empathy. “Prejudice is an attitude. It can’t hurt anyone,” she said. “But discrimination is a behavior, and people get killed because of it every day.”

After Elliott left teaching in 1985, she traveled the world speaking and sometimes conducting the eye-color exercise in workshops at schools, universities, businesses and government agencies. It’s often controversial, but part of what sustains her, I think, is what she learned from that first exercise. That learning was possible and would change how people behaved.

“On the following Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, telling the children that it was blue-eyed students who were smarter,” the Arizona Republic article said. “She sent them to lunch first and let them stay at recess longer, the same as before. But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why. They said, ‘I found out what it felt like to be on the bottom, and I did not want to make anyone feel like that ever again.'”

The Eye of the Storm is a 1970 American TV documentary showing Jane conducting the exercise in her third-grade classroom. In 1985, PBS Frontline aired "A Class Divided", in which The Eye of the Storm is shown to the students—now adults 15 years later—and Elliott learns how much of the lesson her students retained.

It was amazing.

“You know you hear these people talkin' about, you know, different people and how they're, you know, different and they'd like to have 'em out of the country, " said Sandra: "I wish they'd go back to Africa'', you know an' stuff. An' sometimes I just wish I had that collar in my pocket. I could whip it out an' put it on and say, "Wear this, and put you--put yourself in their place". I wish they would go what I, you know, do what I went through, you know.”

“We was at a softball game a couple weekends ago and there was a black guy, "Hi Verla", you know--and we hugged each other and everything, and some people really looked just like, "What are you doin' with him", you know,” said Verla. “An' you just get this burning feeling--sensation--in you that you just want to let it out and put 'em 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", said Susan. “And then right in the next second--I won'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 a 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 then 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 talkin' about old times and they say, "the Japs" and all this an' that, and they start, you know, holdin' that against them,” said Sheila. “I think, "How'd you like to have been them--Japanese-Americans get thrown into these camps just because they happen to be part-Japanese." You know, I--I just said, "You, you calm down and think about it", but when they get older they' re set in their ways and that's not gonna change.”

The blue eyes/brown eyes lesson also had an academic impact. The second year, Jane gave little spelling tests, math tests, reading tests two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise and two weeks later. Students' scores went up on “the day they're on the top, down 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,” Jane said.

Stanford University’s Psychology Department reviewed some of the tests and were astounded, Jane told Frontline. “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 are able to do. And it's happened consistently with third graders.”

Hearing her former students talk about how the exercise had affected their lives, Jane Elliott realized that it turned them into cousins.

“I thought that 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 in that way again. And they said we're kind of like a family now, and indeed we were.”