Jane Elliot Study
...them how to oppress. "They already knew how to be racist because every one of them knew without my telling them how to treat those who were on the bottom," says Elliott. That day, Elliott discovered that "you can create racism. And, as with anything, if you can create it, you can destroy it." For 14 out of the next 16 years that Elliott taught in Riceville, she conducted the exercise. In the White enclave of Riceville, fighting racism was not looked upon by most as an honorable duty. As a result of her work, kids beat up her own children. Her parents’ business lost customers. Elliott and her family received regular death threats. And each fall, parents called Elliott’s principal and said, "I don’t want my kid in that nigger-lover’s classroom!" Not everyone was against Elliott. She believes that 80 percent of the people in Riceville were compassionate, caring people who were concerned about their school and their kids and their community. But, says Elliott, the 20 percent, the vocal, vicious minority, intimidated the rest of them. It seemed as though the only Ricevilleans strong enough to stand up to this vicious minority were Elliott’s students. After participating in the exercise, says Elliott, her students went home and argued with their fathers about racism. Imagine: 8-year-old children telling their parents that they were wrong. In the early ’80s, however, Elliott was denied an unpaid leave to run the exercise for a corporation's employees, and decided to retire from teaching and take her anti-racism crusade on the road. She thus reinvented herself as a "diversity trainer," a PC term for traveling the world challenging racist thoughts and behaviors. But while she may have left the classroom behind, Elliott retained the demeanor of a strict, slightly overbearing grade-school teacher. Today Elliott uses her strong presence and feistiness to capture the attention of college kids and adults in corporate America and Europe. She speaks at colleges about racism and performs the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise at the request and cost of companies that feel the need for some "diversity training." Elliott, who had been a guest on The Late Show with Johnny Carson back in the ’60s has, more recently, been reintroduced to national audiences on Oprah and 60 Minutes. She describes her work as "an inoculation against discrimination." But, unlike DPT shots that protect us from viruses to which we might one day be exposed, Elliott aims to protect us from the "live virus of racism" that we are guaranteed to be exposed to on a daily basis. White Americans’ mouths have been washed out with soap enough times that most of us have learned what words not to utter, or even dare to think. Elliott says that the major difference between exercise participants today and her fourth-grade students of 30 years ago is that, now, people are "less likely to use the word ‘nigger.’ " Despite the milestones achieved through years of struggle for racial equality, people of color are still discriminated against because they are people of color. If you think that a single Black person has gone through life without ever being judged negatively because of the color of his or her skin, you are wrong. No, not all of us Whites are racist. But yes, all Blacks are subjected to racism. Elliott emphasizes this point in her speeches on college campuses. She aims to educate college kids about the realities of life and schooling in America. For example, Elliott contests our use of the traditional world map. She argues that on the maps we are most familiar with, "All the White countries in the world take up half the land, which isn’t true. This is racist teaching." Elliott urges that we reject this map and use in its place the Peters Projection Map. While the Peters map distorts the shapes of the countries, it remains true to their sizes. And, as we all know, size matters. What matters most to Elliott though, is that, as a result of her work, people begin to "recognize racism when they see it, know that it is a choice that we make and that we can choose to not go along with racism." To Elliott, "Choosing not go along" means that we must "actively protest racist remarks, racist advertising, racist politics, racist politicians and racist behaviors." Those are some pretty tough marching orders. And yet, as mentioned, many of Jane Elliott's 8-year-old students challenged their parents' racism after going through the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise. Why is it then that many of us have trouble doing the same? Maybe it’s because not all forms of racism are as blatant as parents telling their children that a Black family had better not move in next door. Sometimes racism exists in an assumption (a store clerk who closely tracks the movements of a young Black customer but not a White one); a behavior (a teacher who refuses to acknowledge the accomplishments of a Black student with the same pride as those of a White); or an attitude (a White woman who tenses when a Black man steps into an elevator). Elliott has a "laundry list" of things White people can, and should, be doing to end racism. She says that first, like so many alcoholics, you need to admit you have the problem and take ownership of it. Then educate yourself about the problem. Thirdly, realize that you weren’t born racist; you learned to be this way and, you can unlearn it. Lastly, you must follow her marching orders to actively protest racism in all its forms, subtle or blatant. You must take a risk and stop racism. It is not a Black problem, says Elliott,: Racism is a "White attitudinal problem." For too many years we have been blaming racism on people of color, says Elliott. We have thought, "If you people would just get White we’d all be all right." Wrong. If we people would just accept that, as Elliott says, "we are all different and have the right to be so," it will all be all right. EYE-OPENER: JANE ELLIOTT TEACHES EXERCISE AGAINST RACISM Her experiment in the Oprah Winfrey show in 1992 became world famous. Jane Elliott (62) carried out her brown eyes, blue eyes exercise, a behaviour training that lets white people experience what prejudice and oppression does to you. What happens if you don't have any power anymore and are subject to arbitrary discrimination, just cause you have blue eyes? During the international week against racism Jane Elliott came to Holland. Mercita Coronel spoke with her. "Who told you to sit down?" "Do I have to spell everything out for you, sit!" One participant of Jane Elliott's workshop walked out after one hour, another never returned from a quick trip to the bathroom'. Their blue eyes did them in. In Elliott's world brown eyed people form the majority and they have the power. Blueys are dumb, inferior, lazy and they steal. To emphasize their inferiority they have to wear a collar. For blueys the rules are always changing, at the mercy of the brown eyes. A blue eyed participant who walked out before attempts to get back in. Elliott is unrelenting, he's out. In the real world people of colour can't just step out. They don't have a choice. They can't take off their colour. Get Elliott's kids. Elliott developed this behavioural exercise in 1968 after Martin Luther King was killed. As a school teacher in Riceville, Iowa she tried to explain the meaning of King's death to her all white students. Riceville was and is today a white, christian town with a population of a 1000 souls. And no racism according to them. Elliott devised the exercise -this is not a experiment she emphasizes- in which one day the brown eyed children are on top and the next day the blue eyed. "I choose a physical characteristic over which they had no control and attributed negative elements to this characteristic." Elliott choose eye colour because during the second world war eye colour was one of the ways for the nazi's to determine if someone was send to the gas chamber or not. Brown eyes could be fatal even if you had a beautiful German name. "I had no idea how it would work out. If I had known the enormous impact it had on my students and the community, I would not have done it." says Elliott. As a direct result of the success' of the exercise her four children were taunted, spit on and molested by their teachers, their classmates and the parents of their classmates. "From get the Elliott kids it became get the nigger-lover's kids" says Elliott. Outsider Not only her children got it. The day after her appearance on the very popular Johnny Carson Show, the people in Riceville also decided not to buy from her father anymore. They feared black people would think that they all thought like her' and blacks would think life was good in Rice...