Jane Elliot - Icon Profile | Alexandria
Jane Elliott (born May 27, 1933) is an American former third-grade teacher, anti-racism activist, and diversity educator renowned for developing the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise, a powerful and controversial demonstration of how discrimination operates. Through this pioneering work, Elliott transformed from a small-town Iowa schoolteacher into an internationally recognized figure in the field of diversity training and anti-discrimination education.
The genesis of Elliott's groundbreaking exercise occurred in April 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Seeking to help her all-white third-grade students understand prejudice and discrimination, she divided her class based on eye color, treating blue-eyed children as inferior one day and brown-eyed children as inferior the next. The results were both immediate and profound: students designated as inferior performed poorly on tests and exhibited diminished confidence, while those in the superior group showed increased performance and, troublingly, signs of cruelty toward their "inferior" peers.
What began as a classroom experiment in Riceville, Iowa, soon captured national attention after being featured on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and in a PBS documentary titled "The Eye of the Storm" (1970). Elliott's exercise, though controversial, offered unprecedented insights into the psychological mechanisms of discrimination and the arbitrary nature of prejudice. Throughout the 1970s and beyond, she refined and expanded her approach, conducting workshops for corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions worldwide.
Elliott's legacy continues to resonate in contemporary discussions of systemic racism and implicit bias. Her exercise, though sometimes criticized for its emotional intensity, has influenced generations of educators and diversity trainers. Modern adaptations of her work appear in corporate sensitivity training programs and academic curricula, while her fundamental message about the irrationality of prejudice remains particularly relevant in an era of renewed focus on racial justice and equity. Elliott's contribution to anti-racism education raises enduring questions about the role of experiential learning in confronting deeply ingrained societal prejudices and the psychological impact of discrimination on human behavior and potential.
Her work exemplifies how a single educator's response to a historical tragedy can evolve into a powerful tool for social change, challenging us to examine our own biases and assumptions about race, privilege, and human dignity.