Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment on Racism

Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids, Politics on March 27, 2009 at 1:49 pm


Photo: Charlotte Button

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, school teacher Jane Elliott wanted to teach her third-grade class about racism. Rather than a lengthy discussion about it, she decided to show the 8-year-olds what racism is all about in a famous "experiment":

With King shot just the day before in Memphis, Elliott encouraged her third-graders to discuss how something so horrible could happen.

"I finally said, ‘Do you kids have any idea how it feels to be something other than white in this country?’ "

The children shook their heads and said they wanted to learn, so Elliott set the rules. Blue-eyed children must use a cup to drink from the fountain. Blue-eyed children must leave late to lunch and to recess. Blue-eyed children were not to speak to brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children were troublemakers and slow learners.

Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.

Brown-eyed children "became domineering and arrogant and judgmental and cool," she says. "And smart! Smart! All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading. I thought, ‘This is not possible, this is my imagination.’ And I watched bright, blue-eyed kids become stupid and frightened and frustrated and angry and resentful and distrustful. It was absolutely the strangest thing I’d ever experienced."

Corina Knoll of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link

 
Comment (26)    Permalink   Please share:  email this         

Neatorama Shop » T-Shirts About The Economy

You May Be More Racist Than You Think

Posted by Alex in Everything Else on January 10, 2009 at 7:38 am


Soon to be an ex-racist

Are you a racist? While most people don’t view themselves as prejudiced, a surprising new study revealed that many unknowingly have racist views:

The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters." The "experiencers" were placed in a room with a white person and a black person, who played out pre-arranged scenarios for the experiment. The scenarios began when the black role-player bumped the white role-player’s knee when leaving the room.

In the first scenario, the white person did not comment afterwards. In the "moderate" case, the white person said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," after the black person left the room. In the "extreme" case, the white person remarked, "Clumsy n****r."

The "forecasters," meanwhile, predicted how they would feel in these situations.

The magnitude of the results surprised even the authors, Kawakami said. Experiencers reported little distress in all three scenarios, much less than the forecasters did in the moderate and severe situations.

"Even using that most extreme comment didn’t lead people to be particularly upset," said co-author Elizabeth Dunn, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: How Racist Are You? Take the test!

 
Comment (39)    Permalink   Please share:  email this