[ColdNoMore]

For those not familiar with Jane Elliott, which is a huge shame in itself that her work isn't being taught in every school in America...here she and her famous experiment/exercise are explained.


Brown Eyes - Blue Eyes Exercise (poke here)

It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others.

Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy.

Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. "The browneyed people are the better people in this room," Elliott began. "They are cleaner and they are smarter."

She knew that the children weren't going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. "Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical," Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence.

The more melanin, the darker the person's eyes—and the smarter the person. "Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes," Elliott said. "Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing.

You give them something nice and they just wreck it." She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

And some of the responses to her exercise?

Well, let's just say the same attitudes (as so perfectly demonstrated by some of the posts in this thread)...exist today with a whole lot of folks.

"How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children," one said.

"Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage."

Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?"

The main takeaway that people need to really get, is that racism, bigotry, prejudice is NOT predestined...it is TAUGHT.


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