She made her classroom a microcosm of U.S. race relations. What she sees in the country today

Jane Elliot is famous for the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise she carried out in her third grade Iowa classroom in 1968. It was just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and she had had something of an anti-racist awakening. So, she took to her classroom.

On the first day, she separated her classroom by eye color. She told all of the kids in her class with blue eyes that they were superior –— smarter, nicer, better — because of their eye color. They were given extra privileges like extra recess and being first in line for lunch. She praised them and watched them become all of the things she said they were.

The second day, the roles were reversed. And, on each day, the students who were told they were inferior became inferior. They were criticized and put down, and they performed more poorly on tests and other school work. The “superior” students became mean and domineering — and performed better in school.

It was watching a microcosm of U.S. society in her classroom, Elliot said. And it became a famous — and controversial — example of what discrimination does.

Today, at 92 years old, Elliot is a famed educator and speaker on anti-racism. The Show spoke with her more about the exercise, her work and where she sees the country today.

Full conversation

JANE ELLIOT: My husband and I lived in Waterloo, Iowa, for about 10 years, and he ran a grocery store ... in the north end of town, which was the Black section of town. And that's where I learned about people who didn't look like me, but were smarter and had more money and were wiser and were more accepting than anybody I ever met before or since.

And I found out that all the racism that I had learned as a child was a lie. And that changed my life. And then Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. All of a sudden I realized that we're all shades of Black, shades of brown, whatever you want to call us, we're all shades of brown. We all came from the same place. And this is ridiculous.

LAUREN GILGER: You're famous for what's called the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, which you carried out in your third grade classroom a long time ago, 58 years ago now.

Tell us about the moment that you decided to do that. How did you come up with this idea?

ELLIOT: I was born in 1933, and I watched my father ranting and raving for 12 years about what Hitler was doing in Germany and all over Europe. And then here I was watching people kill people because of the color of their skin, and not because of the color of their skin, but because of the ignorance of the way they had been educated.

And I knew that it was wrong, and when they killed Martin Luther King Jr., that was the final blow. There was no way I could just go on and pretend that it didn't affect me because it did. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of our heroes of the month in February in my third grade classroom, and he was dead at the hands of an assassin.

In April, the white teachers in that school thought it was about time somebody had done that. And that's what they said. And I thought, then these aren't educators. They really are just teachers. And I can't continue to be just a teacher. I've got to lead my students out of ignorance so that they will never say the things that these women are saying about people of color.

GILGER: What was it like in your classroom when you carried this out that week?

ELLIOT: It was like I was watching a microcosm of society in my third grade classroom. I watched my brown-eyed people become what white people are in this country on a daily basis. Powerful, domineering, vicious, ugly, discriminating human beings. And I watched my blue-eyed people become what people we call black in this country have to be in this country. Quiet, submissive, frightened, knowing that it has to end, but what if it never ends?

I watched children who were brilliant with blue eyes that day who couldn't couldn't do the easiest tasks for third graders. I watched brown-eyed children who had trouble all year for four years because they were in my classroom because they had some problems, who could do things that they had never been able to do before, because I told them they were superior because of the color of their eyes. And blue-eyed people became inferior because I told them they were because of the color of their eyes.

I learned more that day than my students did, and I have never forgotten it and never will.

GILGER: I wonder like when you decided to do this, right? Like it was risky, I'm sure. Like, was there a thought in your mind that this might not work, that it might not show you what you thought it might show you or your students?

ELLIOT: Oh, I knew it would work because it had worked. Racism has worked in this country for about 400 years. So I knew it would work. What I didn't know was how my peers and the people in the town would react to my being the town's only N-word lover.

GILGER: Right.

ELLIOT: I didn't know that my parents would lose their business, that nobody would have anything to do with me, that my kids would be beaten and spit on and called all the names that go with racism because they had a mother who said, it's all right not to be white because nobody is.

GILGER: Right. So I mean, this took like a massive toll on your family, on your personal life. How did you take that? I mean, it sounds like you turned this into a mission.

ELLIOT: No, I didn't turn it into a mission, but what I did was after three years of my kids being beaten and spit on and mistreated by their peers, by their teachers, and by the parents of their peers, we moved out of town. And I moved 20 miles from Riceville.

I continued to teach there, but my kids didn't have to put up with that anymore.

GILGER: So let's fast forward and talk about what's happening in this country today, because you've been doing this work, this anti-racism work for 50 years. You know, you performed that exercise on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Like this is something that has become a really important thread in your life. But we're in this moment in this country that definitely feels like a flashpoint when it comes to racism. We saw Barack Obama elected president. we saw a reaction to that. We saw the country kind of galvanize around Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, and now we're seeing some kind of reaction to that. Where do you think we are in this kind of ebb and flow?

ELLIOT: Well, we're right back in 1955. We're right back where we were before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. In the United States today, we have a whole lot of the population who are scared to death. that people of color are going to become the numerical majority in the United States of America, as they are all over the world. And they're afraid that they are going to treat us the way we have treated them.

This is what's going on right now. We are already outnumbered. Only 15% to 18% of the population, the human population of the earth is classified as white. And it's a misnomer because we aren't white and nobody's Black. We are all shades of brown and nobody wants to admit that yet.

But before I die, and I'm going to deliberately stay alive a long time until this gets accepted by everyone, we are all shades of brown.