1960s Iowa experiment tried on British subjects

A United Kingdom news organization has aired footage of an experiment that will seem familiar to many Iowans who followed the anti-racism work of educator Jane Elliott.

The program, which erroneously indicates that Elliott is from Ohio, recreates a controversial exercise that the school teacher used 40 years ago in Riceville to teach grade school students about racism called “blue eyes, brown eyes.”

In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Elliott, a graduate from the University of Northern Iowa, began separating her third grade students based on the color of their eyes. On the first day of the experiment or exercise, April 5, 1968, blue-eyed children were considered superior and were given certain perks, such as extra helpings at lunch, while children with other colored eyes were treated as lesser citizens and even disparaged.

When students protested, Elliott explained that there was a link between the melanin responsible for creating brown eyes and intelligence and ability. Shortly thereafter, the students who had been deemed as superior began acting in ways that suited their newly discovered status, even to the detriment of classmates that they had previously considered equals and friends.

Those students labeled as inferior also changed, and not for the better. Their academic and social standing suffered as they became more timid and subservient during the course of the experiment.

The following day, Elliot reversed the experiment, making those with brown eyes superior, but it seemed that students who had been taunted the day prior had little appetite for bullying others as intensely as they had experienced.

Although the experiment was met with skepticism locally, the students, who wrote directly to Coretta Scott King and had their reports published in the local paper (and picked up by national press), hugged one another once it was complete.

Through the experiment, Elliott came to believe that the students treated each other differently — something she had not told them to do — based on prejudices and examples that had been set by parents and other adults in their lives. She continued to to do the experiment each year in Riceville until her retirement in 1984, and won national acclaim for the process — even appearing on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and being the focus of an ABC television documentary.

Locally, however, Elliott and her family was shunned and forced into bankruptcy. Even her parents, who ran a local store, were boycotted by locals who did not agree with the anti-racism experiment she had invented. Now, however, she is considered to be on the forefront of diversity training, and has modeled programs for major corporations and government agencies including the U.S. Postal Service. Much of what she has developed has become standard practice at the nation’s universities as they discuss inclusion and anti-racism, and was the subject of the PBS documentary “A Class Divided.”

Even so, there are some in Iowa who believe that Elliott’s exercise brought still unknown harm to the children she taught in Riceville. Heritage Foundation analyst Carl F. Horowitz, one of the teacher’s staunches critics, said Elliot engaged “in a Torquemada-style quest to eradicate racism, real or imagined, from every nook and cranny of American life” and that “everytime a corporation forces new employees — at least Caucasian ones — to endure intensive and prolonged anti-bias training, it is ratifying the legacy of Jane Elliott.”

The exercise in Britain, according to Channel 4, was observed by psychologists, Dominic Abrams and Funke Baffour. British leaders have instituted a program aimed at equality in hiring practices called “Equality Essentials.” The program is believed to have been greatly influenced by Elliott’s work, and is also not without critics who believe the primary purpose is for “ritual humiliation of whites in front of black audiences.”