While the heart of what Elliott did was racism abatement, she also began folding into her intense workshops issues of gender and age bias, along with prejudice based on conventional Western beauty standards. The blue eyes/brown eyes experiment, which could last one to three days, was at a glance similar to other human-potential-movement workshops of the era, including Werner Erhard’s est training, in that it focused on changing basic self-perceptions and behavior. They went by names such as team-building, large group awareness training (LGAT), consciousness raising, management by objective, and transformative leadership training. In the process, she turned herself into America’s mother of diversity training.ĭuring the 1970s and 1980s in the United States workshops such as Elliott’s gained popularity in and out of the corporate world. Elliott became a standing-room-only speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities.
She took the experiment to prisons, banks, schools, and military bases. She traveled to conferences and corporate workshops. She tried it on adults, not just in the United States and Canada, but in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. By 1984, Elliott left her public schoolteacher’s job and had taken the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment on the road.Īs for Elliott, the experiment that she popularized on unwitting students began to raise more and more questions as it was unveiled by more educators and trainers in more places. Soon, multitudes of teachers around the world, looking for a magic bullet to erase racism, adopted the experiment and imported it into their own classrooms.Įlliott would play a role resembling that of the contemporary anti-racist author Robin DiAngelo today: a white woman who becomes a famous, international authority on bias.
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Two months after trying it out, Elliott appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, followed by an appearance in an award-winning network TV documentary, and a headline-making White House conference on education. The experiment certainly changed Elliott’s life. It did, though not necessarily in the ways Elliott intended. She said she hoped that the gut-wrenching experiment would stay with the children for the rest of their lives. That was part of convincing the students that the experiment was real. In fact, Elliott encouraged them, based on the children’s newly granted superiority or inferiority. Fistfights erupted on the school playground that she didn’t stop. The brown-eyed kids would now be considered inferior.Įlliott’s commitment to the experiment was total, and it made an impact. On the second day, Elliott switched the students’ roles. The blue-eyed students wouldn’t be allowed second helpings in the cafeteria. She told the blue-eyed kids that they’d have to use paper cups if they wanted to drink from the water fountain.
She instructed the blue-eyed kids not to play on the jungle gym or swings with the brown-eyed students. On the first day of the two-day experiment, Elliott told the blue-eyed children that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed children. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she pioneered an experiment to show her all-white class of third graders what it was like to be Black in America.Įlliott, who is white, separated the students into two groups-those with blue eyes and those with brown eyes. Elliott was a schoolteacher in Riceville, Iowa, a small town with a population of 806, in 1968. You may not know Jane Elliott by name, but you likely have heard of the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment, which has been performed on hundreds of thousands of children and adults across the United States and around the world. Indeed, one of the best-known classroom experiments to combat racism remains a divisive subject more than a half-century after it was tried out in a rural Iowa elementary school. Today’s heated arguments about critical race theory shouldn’t surprise us because they aren’t new.
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