Blue-Eyed, Brown-Eyed Bunkum

Corina Knoll is a young Korean-American journalist at the Los Angeles Times who recently interviewed and wrote a revealing appreciation of Jane Elliott, an Iowa teacher who made, first, headlines and then, fame and at least some fortune, with a controversial method she developed of teaching whites how racist they are.

Elliott … created a now-famous exercise for her classroom of white third-graders. It was the day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and she was struggling to explain the concept of racism.

She hit upon an idea: For an entire day, she conducted her class as if the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes. Elliott eventually made headlines, appeared on “The Tonight Show” and became the subject of multiple documentaries.

Three decades later, my high school sociology teacher played us snippets of a news program about the “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. For a 16-year-old Korean adoptee growing up in Iowa, the most fascinating aspect was this: Elliott had made history in Riceville, two hours from my hometown.

The daughter of white parents, I grew up in a predominantly white city, attended an overwhelmingly white school and interacted mostly with white friends. The subject of race in my community was hidden, buried under rhetoric that insisted we remain “colorblind.”

Elliott was the first white person I ever heard who admitted to the privileges of whites, acknowledging that visible differences affect how the world perceives us. Her words sparked a hunger in me for more.

She found it and, in the words of Richard Palmer, a reader who pointed me to her column, “went on to become yet another race obsessed journalist.”

Jane Elliott, however, is another story, a fascinating case, perhaps the founding mother of race-obsessed white guilt in America. According to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine, her work

is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others.

As Jane Elliott herself is only too happy to tell you,

Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this does not apply to you. . . you are in for a rude awakening.

In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. over thirty years ago, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Everyone who is exposed to Jane Elliott’s work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it.

“Rude” does seem to be the word for Elliott’s method. Alan Charles Kors, a distinguished historian at the University of Pennsylvania who has written a thorough and perceptive analysis of the movement Elliott embodies, describes her as the “Torquemada of thought reform.” And he’s not alone. Linda Seebach, a former columnist for the former Rocky Mountain News (perhaps it couldn’t survive her retirement) wrote in 2004, quoted in the Smithsonian article linked above,

that Elliott was a “disgrace” and described her exercise as “sadistic,” adding, “You would think that any normal person would realize that she had done an evil thing. But not Elliott. She repeated the abuse with subsequent classes, and finally turned it into a fully commercial enterprise.”

According to another discussion of Elliott’s work,

The BBC opines that her training style is “uncompromising, brusque and authoritative. She tells her captive audience, she is their “resident BITCH for the day – Being In Total Control Honey.” Strong critics of Elliott, such as Carl F. Horowitz call her the “Dominatrix of Diversity” who wages “…psychological warfare against employees – more specifically, white employees….” [Citations omitted]

More from Kors on Elliott’s Iowa beginning:

Blue Eyed arose from Elliott’s elementary school class in Riceville, Iowa, where, starting in 1968, she inflicted upon her dyslexic students an experience in which they were loathed or praised based upon their eye color. According to Elliott, she was ostracized for this experiment, her own children were beaten and abused, and her parents (who were racists, she informed a Dutch interviewer) were driven into isolation, bankruptcy, and despair because they had raised “a nigger lover” (one of her favorite terms).

In her modest explanation, once news of her exercise with the children made it onto national television, the people of Riceville feared that blacks across America would assume that everyone there was like Elliott and would move to their town. To punish her for that, they stopped buying from her father. Elliott also revealed to her Dutch interviewer that she abandoned teaching school in 1984 to devote herself full time to diversity education, for which she receives $6,000 per day from “companies and governmental institutions.”

The Los Angeles Times’s Knoll reports her income more recently (Kors was writing in 2000) as “about $7000 a day,” but she tells essentially the same story:

Customers stopped patronizing the hotel her parents managed. Passersby called her names and shouted insults. The bowling team that she had long played for replaced her, and she was no longer invited to play bridge. Her children were spat on and knocked down, their belongings defaced.

When Darald got a job managing a supermarket in nearby Osage, the family was happy to move, although Elliott stayed on as a teacher in Riceville and continued to conduct the exercise. She still marvels that she wasn’t fired, believing it was because four generations of her family had lived in the community.

“And I’m white, so I have credibility,” she adds….

Despite Elliott’s financial success, there is something worse than sad here, more like pathos. Knoll writes that “Elliott’s outspoken personality clearly continues to chafe on many.”

She says friends her age are hard to make, and over the years her relationships with her family deteriorated. Her mother and siblings asked her not to come around because she made them uncomfortable. Elliott’s mother died seven months ago; she did not attend the funeral.

It is a measure of Knoll’s “race obsession,” I think, that leads her to attribute Elliott’s difficulties with friends and family merely to her “outspoken personality” that makes them “feel uncomfortable.” Nevertheless, both Knoll and Elliott believe that Elliott’s sacrifices were “worth it” because of, well, Knoll herself. At the end of the interview, Elliott asked Knoll:

“Did it make a difference to you when you heard about it?”

I think about a Midwestern girl who wasted years yearning to be white, who believed life would be easier, happier, better, if her brown eyes were not almond-shaped, who wavered between feeling insecure and invisible, and whose heart leaped upon learning of the blue-eyed woman who spoke of white privilege and institutionalized racism.

Did Jane Elliott’s work make a difference to me? Yes, so much so that I felt the need to seek her out just to let her know. Elliott listens, then turns away and sighs. “Yeah,” she says softly. “It was worth it.”

This is a variation on the theme that we’ve seen many times (such as here, here, and here) from many defenders that affirmation action must be worth it because it helped … them.

Here’s a bit more on Elliott’s method and message, from Kors:

In Blue Eyed [a training film based on one of her workshops], masochistic adults accept Elliott’s two-and-a-half-hour exercise in sadism (reduced to 90 minutes of film), designed to make white people understand what it is to be “a person of color” in America. To achieve this, she divides her group into stupid, lazy, shiftless, incompetent, and psychologically brutalized “blue eyes,” on the one hand, and clever and empowered “brown eyes,” on the other. Some of the sadism is central to the “game,” but much is gratuitous, and it continues after the exercise has ended.

Elliott is unbearably tendentious and ignorant. To teach what an IQ test truly is, she gives the brown eyes half of the answers to an impossible test before the blue eyes enter the room, explaining that, for people of color, the IQ exam is “a test about which you know absolutely nothing.” IQ tests only measure “white culture.” They are a means of “reinforcing our position of power,” and “we do this all the time in public, private, and parochial schools,” using “culturally biased tests, textbooks, and pictures on the wall…for white people.”…

… [I]n her view, nothing has changed in America since the collapse of Reconstruction. Every day in the United States, she explains, white power keeps black males in their place by calling them “boy” (two syllables, hissed), “and we do it to accomplished black males over 70, and we get away with it.” We tell blacks to assimilate, which means merely to “act white,” but when they try that, we put them in their place and change the rules. For example (this in 1995), whites now are building up Colin Powell, but as soon as they build “this boy” up, they will kick him down. For Elliott, the Powell boom was a conscious conspiracy to humiliate and disorient blacks.

She teaches her “blueys” with relish that protest accomplishes nothing, because if blacks protest, “we kill them.” It is not smart to speak up or act clever, which is why blacks appear passive and stupid. The lesson: “You have no power, absolutely no power. …Quit trying.” Blacks might try to “win” on the inside, but it is almost impossible to validate oneself when white society puts you down “all day, every day.”

….

In short, this is America, and there truly is no hope. Nothing ever changes. No one can succeed by effort. Culture, society, and politics all are static. “White privilege” controls all agencies of power, influence, and image, and uses all the means that arise from these to render “people of color” psychologically impotent, confused, passive, and helpless. So either vent your hatred or assume your guilt.

Based on Knoll’s interview just before last fall’s election, the rise of Obama did not seem to have much of an impact on Elliott’s views.

It is late October, five days before the United States elects its first black president, and Elliott is in a dither. Her Iowa absentee ballot in favor of Barack Obama was mailed in weeks ago, although she worries about what he’s up against.

“Whatever a black person does, he has to do twice as good as a white person to be thought of as half as good,” she says, her sharp voice rising.

Dressed in a pink cotton shirt, jeans and white tennis shoes, Elliott is the picture of a grandmotherly retiree, but her voice remains that of a stern teacher. Obama “mustn’t look angry because we have demonized black men,” she says. “He knows exactly how to get accepted. He’s a bargainer . . . and that’s OK if that’s what it takes to get white people to listen.”

Finally, even leaving aside Elliott’s dismal, deterministic view of the inoperable rot of racism at the core of American society, it seems to me that there is a fundamental inconsistency at the core of the blue eyed/brown eyed exercise. First, note that Jane Elliott herself tells us that the meaning, the significance, of her blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise is that it “exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors.” Race, in other words, is not real, is only a matter of pigmentation (in her exercise, of the iris; in real life, of the skin), and thus there are no differences between the groups arbitrarily assigned to the two different classes.

But if there are no real differences between the “classes,” then how do the brown-eyed or blue-eyed provide “diversity” to the those assigned to the other class? If any of those large corporations or government agencies who have paid Ms. Elliott $6000 or $7000 a day (or universities that have used her exercise in their freshman indoctrinations orientations) really believe in her view of racial reality, then they all should move immediately to dismantle all their “diversity” programs.

That’s the first inconsistency, but there’s another, different one. “Yes,” the defenders of Elliott’s bunkum could retort, “there are no underlying, real differences between the two socially created classes [races], but prejudice and bigotry have made them different!”

Not only could they say that, but they actually do. Here’s Knoll in the Los Angeles Times:

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.”

Perhaps Elliott should be credited with discovering what would later be called “stereotype threat.” In any event, according to one analyst of her work, Elliott believes that her exercise provides

proof that black underachievement was purely a product of white-dominated constructions of reality. Turn the tables on whites, and they, too, will perform poorly. “We had one (brown-eyed) girl with a mind like a steel trap who never misspelled a word until we told her that brown eyes were bad,” she proudly recalled to a campus audience many years later.

And just think: if such profound differences can be produced during the short span of an Elliott-orchestrated exercise, imagine the results of centuries of oppression! “I’m only doing this for one day to little white children,” as Kors quotes her. “Society does this to children of color every day.”

But wait. Doesn’t it prove too much to say that prejudice and bigotry can make the privileged class smart and assertive and the victimized class dumb and passive? If the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise amounts to more than just children (and adults put in the role of children) playing games, it suggests that discrimination-induced differences are real and lasting, and that suggestion in turn calls to mind a phenomenon I’ve discussed before, such as in “Victims … Of Victimization Theory”:

… the degree to which those who vigorously criticize oppression often portray the subjects whose interests they mean to support as helpless victims.

Perhaps the most influential example of this phenomenom was the publication in 1959 of Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, by the influential American historian Stanley Elkins. Influenced by the research of psychoanalyst Bruno Bettleheim, who had argued that Nazi concentration camps had “infantalized” their inmates, Elkins argued that the institution of slavery, like the concentration camps, was so oppressive and so all-encompassing that it broke the wills and psyches of slaves, making the “Sambo personality” real, not a figment of the imagination of deluded slaveowners. Elkins himself, by the way, was a liberal, and his analysis influenced many policy initiatives in the 1960s, not least of which was his friend Daniel Moynihan’s call for efforts to shore up the black family.

Elkins’s influence can also possibly be seen in the reference to the “comfortable concentration camp” by his Northampton neighbor, Betty Friedan, in her Feminine Mystique (1963). For a later generation of much more radical feminists, the “concentration camp” was not so comfortable. Andrea Dworkin, for example, was widely known for arguing that “all sex is rape,” i.e., that women have been so oppressed, so victimized, by male hierarchy that they are incapable of giving consent. [As I noted here in discussing EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., Prof. Alice Kessler Harris, the EEOC’s expert witness, argued much the same thing. “In fact,” I pointed out, “she was so hostile to the idea that the system leaves women any room at all to choose that she insisted on placing the terms “choice” and “women’s interests” in quotes, and even went so far as to deny that women themselves choose their own major subjects in college or that women business owners choose the types of businesses they own. ]

My own view, however, is that Ms. Elliott’s entire edifice is bunkum and thus that we should not waste time trying to determine whether the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise proves that a) racial differences are superficial, arbitrarily assigned, and irrelevant or b) that race is real, a visible reflection of the deep-seated and long-lasting damage that a bigoted and prejudiced white society has imposed on (and in) its racial victims.

Her exercise, in short, is fit for neither man nor beast. In fact, if it had been conducted on animals she would have been reported to the SPCA.

Say What? (9)

  1. Laura(southernxyl) March 30, 2009 at 12:33 pm | | Reply

    What Elliot’s exercise illuminates isn’t anything about white people, but rather an unattractive aspect of human nature. Black people report stratifying among themselves based on lightness or darkness of skin.

    I think her work could usefully be presented to people in a totally race-neutral way. Too bad it’s probably not possible now.

  2. Mike Bertolone March 31, 2009 at 7:50 am | | Reply

    Elliot was one of the first in a long line of racial/gender charlatans who managed to turn a nice profit off of these shenanigans.

    Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Molly Yard and others subsequently turned the racial/gender shakedown into a major industry.

  3. Frazetta_girl April 7, 2010 at 12:27 pm | | Reply

    The article by Linda Seebach of the Rocky Mountain News referenced the abuse committed upon my son at his school. He was forced to wear a yellow badge around his neck and he and the other yellows, or lowest-caste kids, were heaped with abuse by the teacher and school counselor, who participated in this game. My son was told he would get an “F” in the class because he was a yellow, and that would go on his permanent grade. He was so upset he was in tears when he got home.

    Now the school just shows the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes video at school, and no longer practices this sort of sick (and in my opinion, sado-masochistic sexual) abuse. The teacher still teaches there. The counselor still works there. As a parent I could do nothing but raise a fuss (for which I am grateful to Linda Seebach) and try to harden my kids against the inevitable abuse that teachers will try to commit upon them.

    Thanks for putting together this article. I don’t go a week without thinking about happened to my son.

  4. Nicholas Stix October 23, 2011 at 4:50 am | | Reply

    Did anyone ever try to get Elliot arrested for child abuse? If so, what happened? And if not, why not? I know that if my son came home telling tales of such abuse, I’d be on the phone immediately, seeking a lawyer to sue the city.

    In the same vein, I find it much more likely that the abuse that was visited on her family—assuming she didn’t just make it up out of whole cloth, which is a huge assumption—was out of revenge for her abusing other people’s children, rather than because people considered her a “n—-r-lover.” This woman should have been imprisoned.

  5. Unamused November 4, 2011 at 1:48 am | | Reply

    I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Stix. I’ve read about this case before (possibly here), and much of this qualifies as child abuse — assuming it’s true, which I doubt. For instance, “All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading” sounds like an embellishment. (She’s told this story how many times?)

  6. Mary January 16, 2014 at 12:46 pm | | Reply

    I am doing some research on “diversity” training, which is in reality divide-sity training, because I do not see anything positive coming out of all of this divisivness. Jane Elliot is the grandma of this hateful business and has always been too hypocritical to change anybody’s mind because treating others the way she would like to be treated is the first rule that she breaks.

    Liberals tend to be a looney bunch though and are not the type to step aside for anybody. Someone else always has to make the sacrifices. Jane is no different. She jumps in and stirs up racial tensions and then just takes off with companies’ money and leaves behind the people who still have to work together to deal with raw emotions that she stirred up. This is going to create racists where there were none before. She is a complete fraud and a sadistic nut case.

    Anyone on the receiving end of her lefty progoganda deserves the pay of those who participated in hurting their co-workers. This would stop fast if it cost the tormentors anything beyond lame claims of how “educational” it was to let someone else suffer.

    Please pardon typing errors. I am visually impaired.

  7. Maureen April 15, 2014 at 10:43 am | | Reply

    What a horrible teaching model.

    Respecting the differences takes a much less important place in trying to eradicate racism than embracing the sameness.

    I have a varied circle of friends, from different cultures, races, religions and socio economic backgrounds. It is not the things that are different about us that makes us friends, makes us respect each other, and makes us care. It is the things that are the same. When meeting new people, noticing their skin colour is automatic. So is noticing an accent, or a physical disability. I would not prefer the company of a similarily aged white woman, who was flaky, unreliable, promiscuous and a partier just because she was white. She has nothing in common with me except skin colour. I’d prefer anything but a person who exhibits habits that I find undesirable. The person inside is much more important than the skin colour that houses the person on the inside.

  8. Matt July 16, 2016 at 7:54 pm | | Reply

    The experiment is false because it claims to teach the students what it feels like to be the oppressed and the oppressors – but the superior group are not the oppressors – they’re just doing what Elliott tells them. SHE is the oppressor. White people are not the problem – it’s the people in charge: the upper class elite who run the world who create all these artificial boundaries.
    It’s not skin colour at all; it’s being a selfish prick with tonnes of money.

  9. Mark Raymond November 29, 2016 at 7:24 pm | | Reply

    I had the displeasure of attending one of Ms. Elliot’s presentations while I was a student at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She came across as rude, sadistic, brusque, and gratuitously mean-spirited. At first, students nervously laughed as she called herself a “bitch” and talked of being called a “nigger lover”. The laughter soon turned to gasps, however, as many of us were shocked by her persona and the way in which she responded to students in the audience. I have nothing but unpleasant memories of this woman. I left the presentation thinking of her as diabolically insane.

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