Static Live Magazine July 2020

ON THE BLOCK
A Powerful Lesson
By Jenny McLain
On April 5, 1968 American school teacher Jane Elliott first
conducted her now famous “Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes” exercise for her
third grade class. It was the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated. She decided after watching the madness that it was
time to try the eye color exercise she had thought about many times
but had not introduced to her students. She created a microcosm
of society in a third grade classroom. The local Iowa newspaper
published the compositions the students had written about the
experience and it put Ms. Elliott on the path of becoming a public
speaker as an antiracism activist.
The third time she held the classroom exercise with her third graders
in 1970, it was filmed and became the documentary “The Eye of the
Storm”. This also inspired a retrospective fifteen years later called “A
Class Divided” on an episode of the PBS series Frontline, revisiting
the students at their High School Reunion. She has conducted the
exercise with college students, which is the subject of the 2001
documentary “The Angry Eye”. In the episode of Frontline, she
conducted the exercise with a group of employees from the Iowa
Department of Corrections, which includes the “debriefing” of the
group at the end of the exercise.
If you are not familiar with it, Jane Elliott taught at a school in
Riceville, Iowa, a town with an exclusively white Christian population.
It must have been difficult for the people there, and especially the
school children, to understand what was going on in other parts
of the United States. She began the day by talking about what
kinds of people are treated differently and why, and she asked
the students if they could understand how it would feel if they were
treated differently based on the color of their skin. They quickly
said they could, but she wanted them to FEEL it. Then she asked
them what was different about them individually that might be used
to separate them into groups. They split the class according to eye
color. Since she, the teacher, has blue eyes, she decided that the
blue eyed people would be on the top first.
The kids with brown eyes were given collars by the kids with blue
eyes so they could be easily identified from a distance and the class
was told that blue eyed people were smarter, cleaner, and more
civilized than brown eyed people. They were given examples of bad
things that people who happened to have brown eyes had done
and good things that were done by people with blue eyes and she
made the argument that they behaved a certain way because of the
color of their eyes. For that day, the blue eyed people would have
5 extra minutes of recess; the brown eyed people could not use the
drinking fountain and had to use paper cups. The blue eyed people
could not play with the brown eyed people at recess, because the
brown eyed people were not as good. The blue eyed people sat at
the front of the room. The kids started owning the situation, treating
their classmates differently, coming up with punishments if the brown
eyed people got out of hand. Ms. Elliott says in the documentary
that the transformation happened within 15 minutes of beginning the
exercise. She called them “ghastly”.
The tables were turned the next day and the brown eyed people
were on top. She again gave examples of bad things done by blue
eyed people and good things done by brown eyed people. The
collars were switched and the same privileges given to the blue
eyed people the day before were given to the brown eyed people.
The expressions on the faces of the children is agonizing; you can
see the frustration of feeling helpless when judged by the color
of their eyes by kids who were their friends the day before and
the euphoria of being considered superior. The kids who wore the
collars did worse during lessons but did better when not wearing
collars, simply because they were treated a certain way.
After the two day exercise, Ms. Elliott talks to the students about
how they felt while wearing the collars. One boy said he felt like a
dog on a leash and another said it was like he had been locked
in a prison. There is a powerful image of one of the blue eyed
kids taking his collar off and tearing at it with his hands and teeth.
In the end, they came together again as a class, with their arms
around each other because they were released from the idea that
they were better or worse based on the color of their eyes, each
understanding the feeling of being judged unfairly. During the
retrospective, they said they continue to feel a certain bond with
each other because of the lessons they learned over those two
days, fifteen years earlier.
Also during the Frontline retrospective, the employees from the Iowa
Department of Corrections talked about the frustration of being
labeled inferior. When asked why they let a few of the people
wearing collars stand up for themselves alone instead of joining
forces they said that if the attention was on those few, it would be
away from them. If those few had been successful, they would have
joined them in the protest, but they felt that resistance was pointless.
I first became aware of the exercise when I was working at Procter
& Gamble, a company that was very focused on teambuilding. My
job was to travel to various locations and conduct training classes
for sales reps who were being issued laptop computers. I had
worked as a district secretary before joining the IT department so
I was familiar with their jobs as sales reps. Most of them were
older and more experienced than me, except that they had never
used a laptop. For the most part, they didn’t want the change that
was being forced on them and they especially didn’t want a young
woman who looked even younger than she was to be a symbol of
the change. But, because of the teambuilding efforts of the company,
we understood our roles and I can honestly say that I always felt
respected, even if not always appreciated. And I was fine with that.
I didn’t understand at the time what an impact it would have on my
life. It gave me confidence in myself, my knowledge, and my abilities.
Imagine how different the world would be if every third grader
were taught this lesson, however harsh. Now lament the fact that
no school today would be allowed to teach it.