Elliott, Jane. “Untitled.” Janeelliott.com, 2019
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Jane Elliott is a former third-grade teacher who earned national recognition for her “Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes” demonstration. Fed up with racism, after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Elliott created this exercise and did it with her students the following day. In it, she separated her students (who were mostly white) by whether they had brown eyes, or blue/green eyes. She then treated the students who had brown eyes very well, while the blue- and green-eyed children experienced discrimination, putting them in the shoes of black Americans who had suffered discrimination their entire lives. She later went on to perform this experiment with an audience at the Oprah show, which became very well known. Whether or not the exercise actually is effective at reducing racism is a subject of debate among scholars.
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