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Some residents were furious. The fourth of five children, Elliott was born on her family's farm in Riceville in 1933, and was delivered by her Irish-American father himself. There are risks to those inoculations, too, but we determine that those risks are worth taking. I felt mad. And they are smarter than blue-eyed people." The brown-eyed children got to sit in the front of the room, to go to lunch first, and to have more time at recess. Jane Elliott, one of the most controversial figures in U.S. education and diversity training, began her journey to international acclaim in Riceville, Iowa. Blue Eye/Brown Eye is an experiment performed by Jane Elliot in 1968 on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to demonstrate what prejudice was to her third grade class. Elliott and I were sitting at her dining room table. ", "I've never forgotten the exercise," Whisenhunt volunteered. Withdrawn brown-eyed kids were suddenly outgoing, some beaming with the widest smiles she had ever seen on them. On the first day, the blue-eyed students were informed that they were genetically inferior to the brown-eyed students. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the local . Fourteen years later, the students featured in The Eye of the Storm reunited and discussed their experiences with Elliott. Elliott began the exercise by dividing her students by eye color. The American Psychologists Principles and code of conduct state that in cases of deception, experimenters should take into consideration the potential harmful effects to participants. She nodded. Ethics + Religion; Health; Politics + Society; . Elliott created the blue-eyes/brown-eyes classroom exercise in 1968 to teach students about racism. The nonstop parade of sickening events such as the murder of George Floyd surely is not going to be abated by a quickie experiment led by a white person for the alleged benefit of other whites as was the case with the blue-eyed, brown eyed experiment. ", Elliott replied, "Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?". She traveled to corporations, banks, prisons, schools and military bases. Why Did Jane Elliott Choose Eye Color To Divide Her Students? ", Walt Gabelmann, 83, was Riceville's mayor for 18 years beginning in 1966. The ethical concerns arising from the experiment are consent and deception. I got to have five minutes extra of recess." Back in the classroom, Elliott's experiment had taken on a life of its own. "Because we might catch something," a brown-eyed boy said. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise ." As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed. See Page 1. "You have to put the exercise in the context of the rest of the year. She was a local girl and the other teachers were intimidated by her success. One key assumption is that the sample population represents an actual society. One scholar asserts that it is "Orwellian" and teaches whites "self-contempt." Initial Reaction to the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise. She told the kids that blue-eyed children weren't as good as brown-eyed or green-eyed ones. They are cleaner than blue-eyed people. The idea of white privilege is closely tied to Elliotts initial question to her students. Sadly, these conversations are still relevant today. Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The nearest traffic light is 20 miles away. One of the ways Hitler decided who went into the gas chamber was eye color, Elliott said in a later speech. In 1970, she demonstrated it for educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. Jane would get invited to go to Timbuktu to give a speech. Shermer and Bloom discuss: "Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes" Jane Elliott famous racism experiment reactions to it (in the classroom, locally, nationally, internationally) whether the "experiment" was really more of a demonstration public interest, from Johnny Carson to Oprah Winfrey the questionable ethics of the experiment what it reveals about tribalism, racism . It has since evolved into an online blog and YouTube channel providing mental health advice, tools, and academic support to individuals from all backgrounds. Having in mind that it would be difficult to explain to third graders about discrimination, she needed to be more practical so that her student could understand how discrimination and prejudice felt. Brian, the Elliotts' oldest son, got beaten up at school, and Jane called the ringleader's, mother. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking . Brown-eyed people, she told the students, are smarter, more civilized and better than blue-eyed people. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise.". They don't replace the diagnosis, advice, or treatment of a professional. When some of the . ", That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Undeterred, Elliott tried to appeal to Pauls self-interest. The demonstration has since been taught by generations of teachers to millions of kids across the country. As a journalism professor and author of a book on race that spans more than 50 years, Ive watched these developments with great concern. The children were not aware of the experiment, and therefore they could not give their permission of involvement. Pasicznyk joined 75 other employees for a training session in the companys suburban Denver headquarters in the late 1980s. He printed them under the headline "How Discrimination Feels." Mental Sandboxes and Their Usefulness in Today's World, The Law of Reversed Effort: When Taking Action Isn't the Best Option. The experiment known as Blue Eyes Brown Eyes experiment is regarded as an eye-opening way for children to learn about racism and discrimination. When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Terms of Use ", Absolutely not. From the moment the experiment begins, Jane Elliott uses a mean tone to speak to the participants. In this 1998 photograph, former Iowa teacher Jane Elliott, center, speaks with two Augsburg University . I think it can. . Elliott? I want to know why youre so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others., The first reaction I get from teachers, who see this film or from hearing, hear me discuss what I do say to me How can you do that to these little children? Today, she says, it's still playing out as the U.S. reckons with racial injustice. She learned that the responses from the children were negative and more generalized about what they thought about black people. How do you think the world would change if everyone experienced the perils and setbacks that come with prejudice and discrimination? Children with brown eyes were forced to wear armbands that made it easy for people to see that they had brown eyes. "She was an excellent school teacher, but she has a way about her," says 90-year-old Riceville native Patricia Bodenham, who has known Elliott since Jane was a baby. . This procedure is sometimes so subtle that no one notices it happening. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? Blue Eyed vs Brown Eyed Study Conducted by Jane Elliott Presentation by Bree Elliott Ethics Background The Results In 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, Jane Elliott was the teacher of a third grade class in the town of Riceville, Iowa. Malinda Whisenhunt? It is quite powerful to watch. Select from the 0 categories from which you would like to receive articles. Was The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Experiment Ethical? The second day, Elliott reversed the groups. Elliott shared the essays with her mother, who showed them to the editor of the weekly Riceville Recorder. Blue-eyed students suggested that the teacher use a yardstick to discipline brown-eyed students that misbehaved. Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes experiment was a turning point in social psychology. Stripping away the veneer of the experiment, what was left had nothing to do with race. Even family members can turn against each other if some authority suddenly decides that those differences are a problem. Elliott went after Ken and Barbie all day long, drilling, accusing, ridiculing them, to make the point that whites make baseless judgments about Blacks all the time, Pasicznyk said. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. We have to let people find out how it feels to be on the receiving end of that which we dish out so readily.". In fact, most of the initial response was negative. Elliott said that blue-eyed people were less intelligent and less clean. Ethical & Pedagogical Issues 2. Elliott was shocked by the results and decided to switch the roles the following day. She and her husband, Darald Elliott, then a grocer, have four children, and they, too, felt a backlash. One of the blue eyed even went to hit a brown eyed just for the fact that he was brown eyed. You give them something nice and they just wreck it." Outside, rows of corn stretched to the horizon. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. The empathy she works to inspire in students with the experiment, which has been modified over the years, is necessary, she said. Kids on top would tease the children who were deemed as the inferior group. She had never met me, and she accused me in front of everyone of using my sexuality to get ahead.. SYNOPSIS OF BLUE EYED. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town's children for more than a decade. In the early morning, dew and fog cover the acres of gently swaying stalks that surround Riceville the way water surrounds an island. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Thus, the dominant group, supported by the authorities, will always have the upper hand. Why was the Blue Eyes and Brown Eyes Experiment considered unethical in psychology? Its not surprising to anyone that some social groups discriminate against others due to ethnicity, religion, or culture. As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed. Focusing on ethics the experiment violated some of the principles and codes of conduct established by the American Psychological Association. ", We stopped on Woodlawn Avenue, and a woman in her mid-40s approached us on the sidewalk. The blue-eyed participants faced discrimination for two and a half hours. Students in the inferior groups were more likely to get a worse score. Many critics that the children were too young to understand the exercise. Blue-eyed people would get 5 extra minutes on the playground and blue-eyed people could not talk to brown-eyed people. When Sarah, the Elliotts' oldest daughter, went to the girls' bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: "Nigger lover.". On the first day of the experiment, Elliott told the children who had blue eyes that they were superior to the children with brown eyes; that they were better, nicer and smarter. On the "Tonight Show" Carson broke the ice by spoofing Elliott's rural roots. Jane Elliott, Creator of the "Blue/Brown Eyes" Experiment, Says Racism Is Easy To Fix. In 1968, schoolteacher Jane Elliott decided to divide her classroom into students with blue eyes and students with brown eyes. The minimal group paradigm has shaped an entire methodology in social psychology. THE ANGRY EYE , a 35-minute video, features Jane Elliott conducting her Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed exercise with college students. Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, says Elliott's diversity training is "Orwellian" and singled her out as "the Torquemada of thought reform." Three sections were selected to be administered the simulation . On the second day of the experiment, Elliott switched the childrens roles. Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage. In the most uncomfortable moments, Elliott reminds the students of violent acts caused by racism or homophobia. The day after Kings murder, Jane Elliott, a white third-grade teacher in rural Riceville, Iowa, sought to make her students feel the brutality of racism. On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott's third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class . They all either smiled or laughed and nodded.". Considering all the stereotypes and prejudices that exist, what kind of damage is being done? On April 4 1968, King was killed by the single . Ms. Elliott, now 87, said she started teaching about racism on April 5, 1968 the day after the Rev. This bibliography was generated on Cite This For Me on Monday, March 7, 2016. At this point you may wish to tell the pupils that you are conducting an "experiment" to look at what prejudice is. Then a picture was taken to remember. "That you, Ms. Through this study, Elliot demonstrated how easy it is for prejudice and discrimination to emerge from just a simple message that people with one eye color are superior to people with another eye color. The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day," she was quoted as saying. The results were the same. Jane Elliot's experiment explains the reasons for discrimination to a small extent. Society made them believe they were better than other people for arbitrary reasons such as skin color or gender. Would you like to find out? The more melanin, the darker the person's eyesand the smarter the person. That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. The study also violates the American Principles of Psychologist codes of conduct making its replication or further investigation unethical. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate . On the first day of the experiment, she declared the brown-eyed group superior and gave them extra privileges like seconds at lunch, extra recess time, and access to the new school playground. This time, the participants werent a bunch of elementary school children they were young adults. On the first day of the two-day experiment, Elliott told the . She says that its shocking how children whore normally kind, cooperative, and friendly with each other suddenly become arrogant, discriminatory, and hostile when they belong to a superior group. The experiment is to help the children to understand about prejudice and discrimination. Kellen Castineiras PSY Dr. Gail C. Flanagan February 6, 2022. . Could you?". Professor Jane Elliott performed a group experiment with her students that they would never forget. How can we teach kids to be more like him? Almost immediately, it was apparent that she had created segregation and prejudice given that the blue-eyed students began exhibiting signs of dominion and superiority. According to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, 2010 the experiment also violates the principle of Integrity. Why are we still talking about this experiment over 50 years later? The hate and discrimination that we see in adults have their origin in their upbringing. The test also included violation of consent in which participation of the children was made involuntarily. It also documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the . Delivery in 6+ hours! For many, the experiment went horribly awry. Scores of others did participate. The killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, was a seismic event, a turning point that compelled many Americans to do something and do it with urgency. After the local newspaper published a story on Elliott and the experiment, she was flown to New York to appear on May 31, 1968, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where she extolled the experiments effectiveness in cluing in her 8-year-old white students on what it was like to be Black in America. She told them that people with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes, for reasons she made up. "You know, sweetheart, you haven't changed one bit. "She got carried away by this possession she developed over human beings. I felt mad. The brown-eyed students also exercised a certain level of power over the blue-eyed students when they put the armbands on them. ", Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise, 'I See These Conversations As Protective': Talking With Kids About Race. They killed hundreds of thousands of people based on eye color alone, thats the reason I used eye color for my determining factor that day., Elliott divided the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features NFL Sunday Ticket Press Copyright . You can start from that point in Activity 2, or you can play the video from the beginning (00:00) so that your students can see civil rights era footage following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as Elliott's students returning to Iowa . "People of other color groups seem to understand," she said. She also made the brown-eyed students put construction paper armbands on the blue-eyed students. Although actions from the experiment show lack of respect towards subjects it has widely been recognized in the study of human behavior in social and cultural context. However, the study shows some bias in the sample size and race of participants. PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. Why do researchers use correlational studies? She left teaching in the mid-80s to speak publicly about the experience and the impact of prejudice and racism. How can put those little children through that exercise for a day? And they seem unable to relate the sympathy that theyre feeling for these little white children for a day to what happens to children of color in this society for a lifetime or to the fact that they are doing this to children based on skin color every day. She asked them if they would like to experience what it felt like to be in a person of colors shoes. And the exercise continued in a similar fashion to how it was executed the day before. Provide your email for sample delivery, You agree to receive our emails and consent to our Terms & Conditions, Order an essay on this subject and get a 100% original paper. And our number two freedom is the freedom to deny that were ignorant., I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our citizens, our black citizens, if you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand. 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 . Children often fight, argue, and sometimes hit each other, but this time they were motivated by eye color. In 1970, a documentary about the exercise was released. [White people] on the other hand, don't have to understand them. It has everything to do with power.. The Hangout Bar & Grill, the Riceville Pharmacy and ATouch of Dutch, a restaurant owned by Mennonites, line Main Street. Elliott is nothing if not stubborn. But they returned to a better placeunlike a child of color, who gets abused every day, and never has the ability to find him or herself in a nurturing classroom environment." It was typical of Elliott's blunt styleno "Good morning," no small talk. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was also an event that spurred educators to action, motivating one teacher to try out a bold experiment touted to reduce racism. . ", A former teacher, Ruth Setka, 79, said she was perhaps the only teacher who would still talk to Elliott. She asks them if they have ever faced treatment like the type that blue-eyed people would experience in the following two and a half hours. In this article, we'll explain what happened during the experiment and discuss its consequences. "They are cleaner and they are smarter.". In 1968 after Martin Luther King was assassinated the United States was in turmoil. Still, Elliott said the last few years have brought out America's worst racist tendencies. She was 10 before the farmhouse had running water and electricity. The brown-eyed children began to act aggressive and mean towards the blue-eyed children. "It's happening every day in this country, right now," she said in an interview with Morning Edition. Jane Elliott, shown here in 2009, remains an outspoken advocate against racism. Privacy Statement ", Elliott defends her work as a mother defends her child. Blue-eyed students slumped in their chairs, as though . Why'd they shoot that King?" Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER! In this scenario, students are told brown-eyed people . Advertising Notice Would you? Blue eyes, brown eyes: What Jane Elliott's famous experiment says about race 50 years on. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise. The experiment was to be a division of eye colour starting with blue eyed student having superiority and then the following day, the roles would be reversed.