In the 1960s, America was a country divided. The black civil rights movement had swept across the country, and as more and more African Americans fought for equality, many racists fought against them.
In the midst of this movement, Jane Elliott, a white teacher from a mostly white town in Iowa, watched as the world around her battled on the streets of cities like Atlanta, Chicago and Washington D.C. She, too, wanted to be involved in gaining equality for all men and women, regardless of race. But how?
And then, one night in April 1968, a shot rang out in Memphis, Tennessee. As Jane Elliott watched the media coverage of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she felt appalled by the way the white reporters could not seem to understand what the black community was going through.
Elliott realized that the problem was the disconnect between what whites knew about racism and what blacks experienced. So, Elliott developed an exercise to change the way her white students thought about racism.
The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise
One morning after King's assassination, Elliott informed her class that they were going to change the way things were done. Blue-eyed children were given pride of place in the classroom. They were given extra recess time, a second helping of food at lunch, and they were allowed to sit at the front of the classroom and participate in class discussions.
Brown-eyed children, meanwhile, were forced to sit at the back of the class and were more severely reprimanded for the same type of behavior that blue-eyed children got away with. Elliott even made up a scientific 'fact' that the melanin that caused blue eyes had been found to be linked with a higher intelligence.
