The Blue Eye Brown Eye Experiment - what went wrong?

The blue eye brown eye experiment is actually known as an exercise. The exercise was first done by elementary school teacher Jane Elliott of Riceville, Iowa in her 1968 third grade class. She wanted to make her all white classroom understand what racism felt like by splitting the group up by eye color. Elliott has said many times she was inspired to do this experiment after the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr. Word of her exercise soon reached Johnny Carson, and in May of that year she made her first national appearance on his late night talk show.

In the coming years the exercise would garner so much media attention that in 1970 she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth.

She continued the exercise in classrooms until 1985. Afterwhich, she eventually became a diversity coach and seminar giver - doing her exercise with adults ranging from employees at IBM to prison guards and parole officers in state and federal prisons, and of course, making 5 appearances on Oprah.

Though Elliott became the face of LGAT (large-group awareness training) workshops in the 80s and 90s and tried to teach white Americans ‘how racism felt’, her lessons with adults largely turned into blame games and what we would know today as the ‘oppression Olympics’, begging the question - how good is this exercise and how well does Elliott, a white woman, understand racism?

In the end, Elliott is a pop scholar with no real background in race relations, nor does she ever cite any sources by Black scholars in her lessons with adults. Though her exercise might be well intended and one could make the argument that by seeing how angry the exercise makes people it’s ‘doing its job’, the real conclusion is that it’s just not a very good exercise that makes the audience reflect in any real way about their position in the world around them.

In this video I dive into Elliott’s story, as well as how her arguments and exercises really shaped how we talk about race and racism in the workplace, schools and our communities today, and how her exercise limits the scope of what racism is and how it appears.

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TIMESTAMPS:
Disclaimer and Content Note 0:00
Intro 0:13
Part 1: The 1968 Classroom exercise 1:54
Part 2: The 1970 Classroom exercise 4:56
Part 3: The 1985 Prison Guard Exercise 11:34
Part 4: The 1992 Oprah Winfrey Show Exercise 14:45
Part 5: Is the exercise good? 30:46
Part 6: Diversity Training by a White Woman 37:39
Conclusion 40:54

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