![]() The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident - and condescending. The brown-eyed children could drink from the water fountain, but the blue-eyed children had to use paper cups. A boy piped up to explain that if she had had brown eyes, she would be the principal or superintendent.Įlliott sent the brown-eyed children to lunch first and gave them a longer recess. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes - and the smarter the person.Ī child noted that Elliott was a “bluey,” yet she was a teacher. The children had answered eagerly, “Yes!”Įlliot separated the blue-eyed children from the children with brown and green eyes. She had the blue-eyed children put on green construction paper armbands.Īnd then she told the children that the brown-eyed students were smarter.Įlliott came up with an explanation: Intelligence, she told the children, was determined by melanin. ![]() “It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves? Would you like to find out?” “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” Elliott had asked her students. All of the children were white. Her 28 students had filed into the classroom the morning after King was assassinated, talking about what had happened. That was what she wanted to teach her students all those years ago.Įlliott taught third graders at a school in Riceville, Iowa, a small town in rural northern Iowa. “It’s indecent, it’s not fair and it’s ignorant.” Judging people based on skin color is as ridiculous as judging people based on eye color - or gender, religion or sexual orientation, she said. “You’ve got to stop believing it, and you have got to stop living it.” “It is a lie perpetuated so some of us can see ourselves as superior to others,” Elliott said. Because, genetically, DNA analyses show, all humans are more alike than they are different. Scientists agree that biological races do not exist among humans. Yes, Elliott knows we have been taught that people can be divided into groups based on shared inherited physical characteristics.īut science has shown that human physical variations don’t fit into neat racial categories, she says. There is only one race on the face of the earth, and we are all members of that race - the human race,” Elliott said. “There are not four or five different races. She paused, looking into the faces in front of her. This is important to understand, she said. “Now everyone who considers themselves part of the human race, sit down,” she said. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the red race,” she said, until everyone was standing. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the yellow race,” she said. People glanced at each other awkwardly as Elliott continued. “Hispanic,” one young man corrected as he stood. “Stand up if you consider yourself part of the brown race,” she said next. “Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the black race, stand up.” Ten or so people got up. “Anybody here who considers themselves a member of the white race, stand up,” Elliott said. It was a Thursday morning, and she was speaking in the Memorial Union at Arizona State University.Ībout 25 people are there, mostly students, and a few invited guests.Įlliott would speak later that day to a full auditorium of 1,200 people at Central High School in Phoenix as part of ASU’s Project Humanities campaign to create opportunities for dialogue about issues like this.Īs part of her visit, Elliott had asked to speak with a small group of students. “It’s 10 o’clock, and we’re going to start now,” Elliott announced. She thinks her message is more important than ever amid growing conflict over race. She minces no words. It was an exercise that would catapult her into a heated national discussion, land her on television and in newspapers, and eventually make her the subject of a half-dozen documentaries and a mainstay in textbooks.Īll these years later, Elliott hasn't stopped talking about what she learned. Which means, she says, it can be unlearned. What happened next proved to Elliot that prejudice is a learned behavior. She divided the children, who were all white, by eye color, and then she told the children that people with brown eyes were smarter, faster and better than those with blue eyes. was assassinated, put her third-grade students through a bold exercise to teach them about racial prejudice. She can hardly believe she still has to say it.Įlliot is best known as the teacher who, on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. She has been talking about how ridiculous it is to judge someone based on the color of their skin for almost 50 years. Jane Elliott is 84 years old, a tiny woman with white hair, wire-rim glasses and little patience. ![]() ![]() View Gallery: Jane Elliott's famous exercise, race 50 years later ![]()
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