ABSTRACT
Jane Elliott is a retired schoolteacher today, but in 1968 she created a now famous exercise in the small town of Riceville, Iowa usually known simply as the “blue eyes–brown eyes” experiment. 1 Elliott first conducted the experiment just after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and by deliberate design it had much to say about the psychology of racial and ethnic differences and most of all how easy it is to create artificial “ ingroups” and “outgroups.” She had attempted to explain what racism was like to the children, but she could see that her all-white class did not really understand what racism was or what it felt like to judge someone on the basis of his or her skin color. So she did something rather remarkable, even radical: she decided to segregate her class based on their eye color. Designating blue-eyed children as “superior”—with deliberate arbitrariness and absurdity—Elliott then began to “discriminate” against the brown-eyed kids, giving the blue-eyed children special privileges and making the brown-eyed ones sit at the back of the class. Brown-eyed kids were not allowed to use the water fountain or to play with blue-eyed children.
