Jane Elliott (born 1933, Riceville, Iowa)[citation needed] is an American teacher and anti-racism activist. She created the famous “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” exercise, first done with grade school children in the 1960s, and which later became the basis for her career in diversity training.[1]
While there are variations of the story, the exercise Elliott developed for her third grade class in Riceville, Iowa was a result of Martin Luther King’s assassination. According to one biographer, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Jane Elliott turned on her television to find out about the assassination. One scene she says that she remembers vividly is that of a (white) reporter, with the microphone pointed toward a local black leader asking “When our leader (John F. Kennedy) was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?” It was supposedly there, in her living room, that she decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans with the lesson done about King for February’s Hero of the Month. To tie the two, she would use the saying “Oh Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.”[1]
The following day she had a class discussion about it and about racism in general. But she states “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” She states her lesson plan for that day was to learn the Sioux prayer about not judging someone without walking in his/her moccasins and “I treated them as we treat Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities.”[citation needed]
The original idea for the exercise came from the novel Mila 18 by Leon Uris, published in 1961, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. One of the ways they decided who went into the gas chamber, according to the novel and history, was eye color.
Because most of her 8-year-old students had, like Jane, been born and were being raised in a small town in Iowa and had seen black people only on television, she felt that simply talking about racism would not allow her all-white class to fully comprehend racism's meaning and effects.[1]
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks[citation needed]. She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.[1]
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess.[citation needed] The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes[citation needed].
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another[citation needed]. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King and write compositions about the experience.[1]
According to Elliott, the first reaction to her exercise (Elliott prefers not to refer it as an "experiment") was in the teachers’ lounge at lunchtime the day she did the exercise for the first time. When Elliott explained what she was doing in her class and why and how a number of shy and slow blue-eyed children were benefiting at the expense of the “brown-eyes", there was disbelief and confusion. One teacher responded that, "I thought it was about time somebody shot that son-of-a-bitch." Elliott was shocked and dismayed. Later, the compositions that the children wrote about the experience were printed in the Riceville Recorder on page 4 on April 18, 1968 under the headline “How Discrimination Feels”. This story was picked up by the Associated Press.[1]
Because of the AP story, Elliott was invited to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. After her telling of the exercise in a short interview segment, audience reaction to her was instant as hundreds of calls came into the show’s switchboard, most of the reaction being negative.[1] An often-quoted letter states “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children.”[1]
Elliott has said that the exercise and the publicity that it was getting did not make her popular with some of the local citizens. When Elliott walked into the teacher’s lounge the day after being on the Johnny Carson show, several teachers walked out. Elliott claims that even her own children were taunted or assaulted by other students.[citation needed]
However, not all the reaction was negative. The mail that Elliott received after each television appearance was overwhelmingly positive, particularly from adult persons of color and educators. Most of the time that she remained in the Riceville school system, she had the support of her superiors and they gave her unpaid leave to pursue outside activities which were related to the exercise and its effects.[1] As news of her exercise spread, she appeared on more television shows, and started to repeat the exercise in professional training days for adults. On December 15, 1970, Elliott provided the experience for educators, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and civic leaders at a White House Conference on Children and Youth, staging it for adults, but with the same reactions as those exhibited by her students, though much more violent.[1]
In 1971, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast a documentary about her called “The Eye of the Storm” and made her more nationally known. After that, two books, “A Class Divided” and “A Class Divided: Then and Now” by William Peters were written about her and the exercise.[1] “A Class Divided” was turned into a PBS Frontline documentary in 1985, and included a reunion of the schoolchildren featured in “The Eye of the Storm”. “Frontline: A Class Divided” is the most requested video on PBS’s website.[2] A televised edition of the exercise was shown in the United Kingdom on 29 October 2009 on Channel 4 entitled The Event: How Racist Are You?.[3] This documentary was intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create an awareness to the effects of racist behaviors by using UK citizens. In fact, actors who had been seen previously on UK programming and commercials were allowed to participate without Elliott's knowledge, thereby discrediting the entire presentation.
Among her honors was being featured by Peter Jennings on ABC as “Person of the Week” and textbook editor McGraw-Hill lists her on a timeline of notable educators along with Confucius, Plato, Booker T. Washington and Maria Montessori.[citation needed] She has been invited to speak at 350 colleges and universities as well as appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show five times.[1]
Elliott considers her greatest honor to be having Kenneth Clark write the foreword to the book "A Class Divided Then and Now" by William Peters in which he states, "...Jane Elliott's contribution demonstrates that it is possible to educate and produce a class of human beings united by understanding, acceptance, and empathy."
Jane Elliott is considered to be the “foremother” of diversity training,[4] with the blue-eyed/brown-eyed scenario as the basis of much of what is called diversity training.[citation needed] She has done such training for corporations like General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education and US Postal Service.[1]
As Elliott began to do workshops and other training based on her exercise to organizations outside of her school system, the Riceville school system granted her unpaid leave to do this. However, the increasing demands to be away from the classroom eventually caused problems with her public school teaching career.[1] Elliott left teaching in the mid 1980s to devote herself full time to corporate training. Her standard fee since then has been at least $6,000 per day for companies and governmental institutions.[citation needed]
The exercise that Elliott developed for her classroom was redeveloped for the corporate world. The exercise was promoted positively as a way to promote teamwork, profits and “winning together”. On the negative side, it was claimed that not doing such diversity training could make these same companies open to bad publicity, boycotts and lawsuits.[citation needed]
Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of non-Caucasians in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism brought about by pressure from civil rights groups during the same two decades.[citation needed]
These policies and rulings primarily dealt with “hostile work environments" such as; the Supreme Court of the United States’s 1986 ruling in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson where employers were accused of tolerating between groups of employees; and the notion of “disparate impact” (established in the 1970s by Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that could hold a company liable for practices that resulted in unequal outcomes even if it was not the company’s intention. Other lawsuits of these two types had been realized against companies like Texaco, CocaCola, Denny's, Chevy Chase Bank, Sodexho and Abercrombie & Fitch. In most of these cases, the judgment went against these companies resulting in the payment of compensation and the implementation of some kind of monitored diversity plan.[citation needed] Elliott herself offered Denny’s as an example of how racism leads to costs via lawsuits. She claimed that Denny’s had to pay US$46 million for one suit but still had an incident later where a group of black children were not waited on, and so predicated another suit for the restaurant chain.
Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity.[citation needed] Elliott said, “If you can’t think of any other reason for getting rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver.” In fact, by the 1980s many corporations had started to accept much of what diversity training proposed to do, adopting role-playing exercises and terms such as “inclusion”, “mutual learning”, “and “winning together”. By 1994, there were 5,000 diversity trainers in the United States.[5] In 2004, Coca Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell asked a court to extend federal supervision of its diversity policy citing such oversight as a valuable resource. The rationale given for this acceptance is that it not only helps with complying with US federal law but helps profits[citation needed] by reducing employee turnover and increasing market reach.[6]
Diversity training based on Elliott’s methods has been mandated by colleges and universities such as Wake Forest University and Johns Hopkins University. Often these are required after incidents such as the Halloween party invitations done by the Sigma Chi fraternity chapter at Johns Hopkins which were accused of being racially offensive.[7]
Elliott-inspired diversity training has been realized outside the United States as well. Diversity training was little-known in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 1990s; however when The Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 passed in the United Kingdom, it listed 100 diversity training firms in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 70% of firms have diversity policies in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these courses are designed to have a “lighter touch” than Elliott’s approach, but those based solidly on Elliott’s model are also promoted.[5] Elliott has personally held workshops in Australia, focusing on racial issues brought up by Pauline Hanson and the lack of acknowledgment of contributions made by aborigines in that country. Jane Elliott sells videos and other materials to be used by diversity trainers on her website.
It should be noted that most of the criticisms below reference seminars and/or presentations which loosely adapted Elliott's techniques and with which Elliott had no connection. Elliott has consistently warned presenters and trainers about the dangers of the misuse of her technique and materials.
According to supporters of Elliott’s approach, the goal is to reach people’s sense of empathy and morality. It seeks to address a sense of apathy that many people have because they do not think the problem affects them or that they do not believe that they act in a racist manner.[6] Elliott says racism is not inherent: “You are not born a racist. You have to carefully be taught to be one.”[8] And while Jane Elliott created the exercise as a response to racial discrimination, her approach is equally touted to point out sexism, ageism and homophobia as well.
However, it is the manner in which these training sessions are conducted and Elliott’s role as a trainer that has drawn criticism. First, she usually puts the “brown-eyed” participants in the superior position. If the group attending the session is of various races, the ones experiencing discrimination are most likely to be white.
The corporate version of “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” is still based on demeaning a chosen group of people and then letting the temporarily favored group taunt them, much the way the brown-eyed children of the original exercise did, and, according to people of color the way minority group members are treated in this country on a daily basis.[citation needed] Like in the original exercise, she does not explicitly tell participants to mock others but uses choice of language and tone, removal of basic rights (such as being allowed to speak without permission) and a constant changing of the rules to discomfort the blue-eyed participants - a deliberate reversal of what happens in society at large. At the same time she uses positive language, praise and encouragement to the brown-eyed people. One way she does this is with the use of an alternative IQ test called the “Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test” which asks questions about the black experience of the 1950s and 1960s. “… which presumes that most whites would not be able to answer, thus mimicking the experience that blacks supposedly have with more conventional IQ tests."[9]
At seminars given at U.S. federal agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), white males were verbally abused by black peers and then forced to walk a gauntlet to be touched by female workers. This, however, is totally irrelevant to Elliott's Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed Exercise, and Elliott is opposed to its being referenced in this article.[7] Jane herself states “When we have multicultural diversity training, one of the first things they have is a dinner where they serve foods from all different lands. Except white. We don’t study white culture ‘cause that’s the right culture’. We already know white culture. We don’t call it white culture, we call it reality.”
Another criticism of such training programs is that they do not permit genuine debate or discussion about the issues to be addressed, even though extensive discussion is encouraged directly following Elliott's exercise, sometimes months after the completion of the exercise, and, in the classroom for the rest of the year.
She has also been accused of not recognizing the social and political changes that have occurred since the era in which she originally developed the exercise. Alan Charles Kors, a conservative professor of history at University of Pennsylvania noted for his defense of students accused of shouting racial slurs in the water buffalo incident of 1993, writes that Elliott’s exercise teaches “blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites,” adding that “in her view, nothing has changed in American [sic] since the collapse of Reconstruction.”(p. 19)[1]
However, Elliott seems to feel that such an approach is still necessary. She is quoted as saying “I’ve reached a point now where I will no longer tolerate the intolerable. I’m a ball of barbed-wire and I know it.” “After 30 years of dealing with this subject of racism, I am no longer a sweet, gentle person. I want it stopped.”[10] She has also expressed frustration at the idea that she still needs to do this exercise, “It shouldn’t be necessary in 2008,” she says, to “…say things that are difficult for people to hear. I’m not kind about it. But neither are the racists.”[11]
She was included in Riceville’s official chronicles which were published to celebrate the town’s 150th anniversary in 2005. And Dean Weaver, who was superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972–1979, thought she was an outstanding teacher who did things differently and made other teachers envious of her success. Ex-principal Steve Harnack commented that she was excellent at teaching academics and suggested she would have had fewer problems with the community if she had involved parents.[1]
More than 450 children went through her experiment from 1968 to 1984 and many say that she is “a hero, a teacher extraordinaire, whose simple experiment, which lasted just two days, forever changed their lives.” ( 9) Almost all these students say that they remember the exercise very vividly and that it made them think, and try to be different. As to whether they want their own children or students to experience it, results are mixed. Special education teacher Jay McGovern, who was one of Elliott’s grade school students, says that she was an outstanding teacher but he feels uncertain about what he experienced in her exercise. “The way she did it, she put people down… Today, … You don’t ridicule or berate people to try to make your point. Back in the '60s, there wasn’t that body of research.” (18) However another student, Dale McCarthy, who went through the exercise in 1969, recalls that while he found the experience “nearly impossible to endure” he realized the benefit the first time he met a black man and shook his hand. He also states that one of his brothers-in-law is black and there is no problem, but adds that if his own daughter had to do that exercise, he would complain to the school. (20-21)[1]
Academic research into Elliott’s experiment is inconclusive about whether it reduces long-term prejudice or if the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits. She has been accused of scaring people, breaking the school rules, humiliating children, being domineering, angry and brainwashing. Two professors of education in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, claim unhesistantly that what Elliott did was unethical, calling the experiment psychologically and emotionally damaging. They also stated ethical concerns connected to the fact that the children were not told of the purpose of the exercise beforehand.[1] Long term results of the diversity training for adults are also unknown. In some courses, participants can wind up feeling frustrated about “their inability to change” and instead begin to feel anger against the very groups they are supposed to be more sensitive to. It can also lead to anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or being offended.[5] However, three years after Elliott's original exercise, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa conducted an attitudinal survey of the third- to sixth-grade students in the Riceville Community School and in the third- to sixth-grade students in a comparable community to measure their attitudes concerning racism. When the results were compiled, not only were Elliott's former students less racist in their responses as measured by this survey, than were their fellow students, but ALL the students in the third- to sixth-grades in the Riceville school were less racist than the students in the comparable community. The associate professor concluded that not only were Elliott's students attitudes positively changed by the exercise, but their attitudes were ameliorating the attitudes of their peers.[citation needed]
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Bloom, Stephen G (September 2005). "Lesson of a Lifetime". Smithsonian Magazine (online). http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/lesson_lifetime.html. Retrieved 2010-07-18.
- ^ "Frontline: A Class Divided". http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ "The Event: How Racist Are You?", channel4.com, accessed 2009-10-30
- ^ Watson,, Jamal (January 2008). "When Diversity Training Goes Awry". Diverse Online. http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/printer_10536.shtml. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ a b c Mirza, Munira (2005-12-12). "Ticking all the boxes". BBC News Magazine. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4521244.stm. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ a b Venderley, Paul. "Paul Venderley’s Blog". Posts Jobing.com. http://losangeles.jobing.com/blog_post.asp?post=7281. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ a b Horowitz, Carl (January 2007). "Jane Elliott and her Blue-Eyed Devil Children". FrontPageMagazine.com. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=0448677C-CFCC-45FB-B50C-A1B8881BAE69. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ McPhee, Nicole (2001-08-09). "Doing diversity right: Renowned Iowa schoolteacher and discrimination educator get to the heart of the matter". Gauntlet News. http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/a/story/2741. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ Fulford,, James (April 2003). "Jane Elliott: 35 Years of Rage". VDARE.com. http://www.vdare.com/fulford/years_of_rage.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ Shah, Allie (1998-03-06). "Race relations expert urges her audience to ‘unlearn racism’; Elliott takes a confrontational tack". The Star Tribune. http://www.highbeam.com/DocPrint.aspx?DocId=1G1:62575543. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ Cooper, Desiree (2008-01-08). "She’s living, teaching the King dream". Detroit Free Press. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID/20080110/COLO3/801100354. Retrieved 2008-04-03. [dead link]
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Elliott, Jane |
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| Date of birth |
1933 |
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