Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

August 15, 2021
How an educator in rural Iowa in the late 1960s tackled racism. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in "resoundingly middle class" Riceville, Iowa, devised an exercise intended to teach her students a "real, significant, and urgent" lesson about prejudice. As Bloom shows in his well-researched investigation, that lesson, in Riceville and beyond, became both admired and incendiary. Bloom, who teaches journalism at the University of Iowa, a few hours from Riceville, interviewed Elliott, her family and students, their parents, and many townspeople, beginning in 2004, when Elliott urged him to write her story--an invitation she eventually angrily withdrew. But Bloom was not dissuaded, intrigued by her career and missionary zeal as "an evangelist for the greater good." After appearing on Johnny Carson's late-night show, she quickly became a coveted speaker on racism, reprising for groups of adults the two-day exercise she had designed for her classroom. Dividing her students into blue eyes and brown eyes, she assigned blues to oppress browns on one day, then reversed the next day. The exercise, meant to demonstrate prejudice, caused a furor: Some third graders were traumatized by the experience, feeling bullied and manipulated. Parents accused Elliott of fomenting hatred, and the more famous she became, the more they condemned her as an opportunist and con artist. "Elliott used her experiment to make herself better than the rest," many believed. Seen as "a know-it-all motormouth" even before the publicity, Elliott was now characterized as narcissistic and exploitative. When her exercise became the subject of documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, and PBS; when she participated in the Nixon White House Conference on Children; when she mounted a side career as a consultant and college lecturer, the town's hatred deepened. Creating a balanced view of both his abrasive subject and her notorious experiment, Bloom discovered that the town's feelings still burn. A cleareyed portrayal of a controversial woman.

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October 4, 2021
Journalist Bloom (The Audacity of Inez Burns) examines in this intriguing and evenhanded account the “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Experiment” developed by third-grade teacher Jane Elliott in Riceville, Iowa, in 1968. Drawing on interviews with Elliott, Bloom details how she sought, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to demonstrate the impact of racial discrimination in America by separating the children in her all-white classroom by eye color. For two days, she declared the blue-eyed children genetically inferior and instructed brown-eyed students to bully, harass, and subjugate them. Then she reversed the instructions. Though Elliott claims the lesson had the desired effect, the children were noticeably traumatized, and their parents were incensed. She became a pariah in Riceville but rocketed to fame outside of rural Iowa, appearing in an ABC documentary and launching a career as a diversity trainer. Still, many who underwent Elliott’s training accused her of being a “self-righteous” bully. Bloom, who finds no evidence that Elliott’s methods have helped decrease prejudice, concludes that “the only sure result of the experiment is that it gets people angry.” What emerges is a rich and thought-provoking portrait of an unrepentant crusader who “may have failed to consider fully the myriad consequences of her actions.” This immersive account offers a fresh perspective on the enduring struggle against racism.