[0:00]I'd like to imagine you are a third grade school teacher in a small town in Iowa, Riceville, Iowa. And you're trying to teach children what discrimination is, what racism is, shortly after the murder of uh Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Your problem is your kids are all white. Your kids are all Protestant. Your kids all come from farming, lower and middle class families. They've grown up together, they know each other. How do you get them to feel, to experience at a personal level what discrimination is all about? Jane Elliott was that teacher, that school teacher Riceville Iowa, um back in early seventies. And she did what I think is one of the most powerful demonstrations of all time, not not by a psychologist, but by a third grade school teacher. Let's look at the power of negative expectations and the power of teachers to shape the reality of students. It's remarkable how small a difference among people can trigger prejudice, and how hard it is to stop prejudice once it takes hold. In no time at all, we can create a totally new construction of reality to define those we dislike and fear, because they are different. A provocative demonstration of the nature of prejudice took place not in a psychologist laboratory, but at a school in Riceville, Iowa. Would you like to try this? Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Is there anything about the blue-eyed people. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher decided to teach her class just what it means to experience arbitrary discrimination. Elliott divided her class into two groups, the inferior brown-eyed people and the superior blue-eyed people. I mean, the blue-eyed people, are the better people in this room. Oh, yes they are. Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. My dad has a Is your dad brown-eyed? One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you. He did. Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son? He's never kicked me. Greg's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. Greg's dad is blue-eyed. He's never kicked him. What color eyes did George Washington have? Blue. Blue.
[2:40]This is a, this is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars, so that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are. Blue-eyed people, each come up and get a collar. You can choose someone to put this collar on. It seems like when we were down on the bottom, everything bad is happening to us. The way they treated you, you felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything. Seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us.
[3:33]What happened at recess? Were two of you boys fighting? What happened, John? Russel called me. Me and tonight, here we went, here in the gut. What did he call you? Brown eyes. Did he call you brown eyes? They always call us that.
[4:06]They call us brown-eyed, and Sandy and Donna were. What's wrong with being called brown eyes? It means that we're stupider, well, not bad. Oh, that's just the same way as other people call black people niggers. Is that the reason you hit him, John? Did it help? Did it stop him? Did it make you feel better inside? Laugh at you when you didn't. I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children, turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in the space of fifteen minutes. I think I learned more from the superior children than I did from the children who were considered inferior, because their personalities changed even more than the others did.
[5:18]Fifteen years later, a reunion brought together the former members of Mrs. Elliott's class. I'm just. All right, now, Raymond, why? I want to know why you were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids. Yeah, at the end of the day I thought the miserable little Nazi. Really, I just, I couldn't stand you. It felt tremendously evil. You could, all your inhibitions were gone. And no matter if they were my friends or not, any pent-up hostilities or aggressions that these kids had ever caused you, you had a chance to get it all out. I felt like I was king, like I ruled them, brown eyes, like I was better than them. Happy. Boy, that day after we went home, and talk about hating somebody, it was there. You hated me. Yeah, of what you were putting us through. Nobody likes to be looked down upon, nobody likes to be hated, teased, or discriminated against. And it just boggles up inside of you, you just get so mad. There are four things I'd like to add to this very powerful demonstration. First is the lesson of this demonstration is the most minimal cues of difference between people like eye color or lip size or virtually anything, can be the basis of discrimination when authority adds values to one or another. Brown eyes is good, blue eyes is bad, thick lips are bad, thin lips are good, it doesn't matter. As long as there's a discernable difference between people, other people can impose value to make one worthwhile and the other worthless. The second thing is what happened when the tables were turned when the brown-eyed kids were put in the position of superiority. They should have practiced compassion because they knew what suffering was all about based on their eye color. Instead the sad message of Jane Elliott study is, kids learned about power. When they were powerful now, they used it against uh their previous tormentors. So this is a big question. How do we, how do we teach people compassion after they have suffered and not want revenge. Teach them reconciliation and not and not retaliation. The third thing is that uh uh Mrs. Elliott and her class gave kids spelling and math tests every day. Can you imagine what happened when kids were in the superior versus inferior position? The interesting thing is when they were in the inferior position, their grades on math and spelling went down immediately. And the interesting thing is when they were top dog, when they were in superior position, their scores on their math and spelling tests went up. So here is an interesting thing about how your intellectual ability or academic performance is influenced by your attitudes toward yourself. Whether you think you are superior, you actually perform better. When you think you're inferior, you actually perform worse. The last thing is Jane Elliott is no longer a school teacher. She goes around the country, I guess around the world, showing this power game or not showing, having people experience the power game in in colleges, in corporations. And again, she uses the most minimal difference. She can actually put put out your tongue. Some people's tongue curls, some can't curl. And then she simply says, if your tongue can't curl, you're inferior. If it can curl, you're superior. And so she teaches people how the most minimal discernible queue can be the basis of discrimination. And the basis of using power to make other people feel worthless and helpless, and make you and your group feel superior.
