Case study - Another cruel experiment on children to explain the racism

Case study - Another cruel experiment on children to explain the racism - A teacher held a famous racism exercise in 1968. As America lost one of its greatest spokespeople who fought day and night against racism, it seemed as though people could only continue to live on through his legacy in order to maintain his efforts. On April 5th, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, a woman by the name of Jane Elliott decided she would partake in maintaining the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.

In an all-white town in Riceville, Iowa, Elliott grouped up all of her third-grade students to discuss the new rules of her class. She proceeded to tell them that people with brown eyes were better than people with blue eyes. Now, people are returning to her work. She asked her students if they wanted to participate in an exercise to see how discrimination worked. The students agreed.

The next day, she separated the children with blue eyes from the children with brown eyes. The blue-eyed children were told they were the superior group and given extra privileges such as more food portions at lunch, more playtime, and they sat at the front of the class. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children and ignore those with brown eyes.

The brown-eyed children wore collars made of fabric to identify them as a minority group and were made to sit in the back rows. Elliott also reprimanded the brown-eyed students when they made mistakes or didn't follow the rules.

The brown-eyed students initially resisted the notion that the blue-eyed students were better. But Elliott deliberately lied, telling them that the melanin responsible for making the students blue-eyed also gave them higher intelligence and learning ability.

As the experiment progressed, the blue-eyed students became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their inferior classmates. Their grades also improved. The brown-eyed inferior classmates changed into timid and subservient children who isolated themselves during recess. Even their studies suffered.

The following week, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed ones in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, it was not as intense.

At the end of the exercise, the students were asked to write down what they learned. The students wrote that it was not right to be judged by the color of their eyes and that the color of their eyes did not make a difference on the type of person they were.

The children's compositions were printed in the local papers, and the story was picked up by the national news media. The story led to Elliott's invitation to be a guest on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson to talk about the experiment and the children.

After her appearance, The Tonight Show received hundreds of phone calls and letters, many of them complaining. An often-quoted letter states: "How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children?" But not all the reaction was negative.