Blue or Brown: A Classroom Divided

Prejudice is a biased opinion about others based solely on their membership in a certain group. The biased opinions that prejudice is based on are rooted in stereotypes; stereotypes are the ideas that people have about members of different groups based on the expected attributes, characteristics, and attitudes of these groups; many of these stereotypes are culturally based. Discrimination is when these opinions about membership of certain groups becomes behaviors directed towards others based on that group membership. Prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes can be based on age, gender, race, nationality, religion, language, class, disability and etc. The direct origin of prejudice and discrimination has not been decided, however, academics concur that people are not naturally born being prejudiced; this is evidenced by the social construct of these attitudes, and the fact there has been extensive evidence found that states that prejudice is not found in young children. Despite the fact that there has been no decision as to the direct origin of prejudice, there is a concurrence that it is a learned behavior that starts with parents, and then later on is influenced by teachers, peers, and the media. Due to the learned nature of prejudice it is not possible to eliminate it completely, the best that can be hoped for is to lessen the instance of prejudice, and this is usually accomplished by education along with legislation; intergroup contact alone has not been found to be successful enough to reduce the instance of prejudice.

In April of 1968, Jane Elliott was a teacher of a third grade class in a small, rural, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa. At that point in time, she and her class of third graders had chosen Martin Luther King Jr. as their “Hero of the Month”. On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; the next day Elliott’s students were extremely confused as to why someone would kill him, because they felt that he was extraordinary and that he should be labeled a hero. Elliott decided at that point that she needed to teach them exactly what discrimination felt like in order for them to understand how horribly vile it can be, and ultimately what prejudice and discrimination were capable of doing to people. She made the decision at that point to perform a two day experiment in which she separated the class into two groups, those that were blue-eyed, and those that were brown-eyed.  On the first day she told her class that they needed to change the way things were done in the classroom . After, she divided the children into the two groups she told them that the blue-eyed children were smarter, nicer, cleaner and just plain better than those that had brown eyes.  She allowed the blue-eyed children to have special privileges, and made the brown-eyed children wear a collar, and she criticized everything that they did. On the second day, the roles were reversed, and those with brown eyes received special treatment, and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior. Elliott had hoped that this experiment would help the children to better understand the feelings of discrimination that certain groups feel on a daily basis, but what she didn’t realize was how powerful this exercise would become. The children that were in the dominant group that previously had been amiable and receptive had become nasty, and they seemed to relish in their feeling of superiority.  Those in the menial group performed poorly on their work, and basically behaved as if they were the inferior class. She stated “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes." At this point she had realized that she had “created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom.” Elliott continued to perform this exercise every year in her classroom.  Her former students stated later on that once you find out what it feels like to be hurt in that discriminatory way you don’t want to hurt others in that way ever again.

A little more than twenty years ago, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” decided to use Jane Elliott’s model to conduct a racial prejudice experiment with their audience, because at that point in time racial tensions were high due to the acquittal of the police officers that had been tried in the beating of Rodney King.  The audience was separated as to eye color just like in the exercise with Elliott’s third-graders, and the brown-eyed individuals were part of the dominant group. Jane Elliott spoke to the unknowing audience, and told them that she had been teaching for over two decades and that brown-eyed people were more accomplished and capable than blue eyed people.  At this point the blue-eyed audience members began to feel discriminated against and they began to voice their disapproval.  One even pointed out that Jane had blue eyes; she didn’t hesitate in her answer to this person’s acknowledgment, and stated that she had learned to act brown-eyed, and that if they too began to behave like brown-eyed people that they could also take off their collars.  The audience members began fighting amongst one another, even coming up with examples as to why this discrimination was relevant. Eventually, the audience figured out that they were part of an experiment and it was at this time that Elliott told them “God created one race: the human race. Human beings created racism.” Recently, when asked about the experiment she said that the reason she chose eye color is because both skin and eye color are created by melanin, and that people are not capable of controlling how much melanin they have in their skin and eyes; therefore, it makes little sense to judge someone based on this fact. She said that she realized after performing this experiment on her third-graders so many years ago how powerful its impact was, and she said “Give me a child at the age of 8 and let me do that exercise, and that child is changed forever.”

Prejudice and discrimination accomplish tremendous effects in the realm of psychological, social, political and economic domains; these are intensified by the feelings of a lesser self-worth, societal estrangement, and other inequalities such as those that are intellectual in nature. Jane Elliott’s continued work on lessening the prejudices and discrimination based on race around the world gives hope that it is possible to decrease the incidence of prejudice and discrimination worldwide by stopping it before it starts.

See you all tomorrow.

Buh-bye.