The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the "Blue-Eyes,
Brown-Eyes Experiment" she made world-famous, using eye color to
simulate racism.
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane
Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white
third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching
impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She
instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed
students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children
the experiment's purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create
abhorrent racist behavior based on students' eye color, not skin color.
As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight
Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey
Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions
worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to
induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel,
self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work?
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details
for the first time Jane Elliott's jagged rise to stardom. It is an
unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated
with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue
Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community
where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town's
children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale
that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also
documents small-town White America's reflex reaction to the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise
of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes,
Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and
righteous woman, today referred to as the "Mother of Diversity
Training," who was driven against all odds to succeed.
