REPORT ON PBS FRONTLINE’S A CLASS DIVIDED by
Robert C. Juneau, B.A. History
INTRODUCTION & REVIEW OF THE FIRST PART OF A CLASS DIVIDED
A Class Divided is a video about Jane Elliot’s Eye Color Exercise and how it demonstrates how if feels to be discriminated against. It also shows how discrimination affects people by showing the feedback she gets from people who have been through the exercise. The video begins by showing eleven students from her class who have come to Riceville, Iowa for a High School Reunion in August 1984 for a reunion of their own with their third-grade teacher Jane Elliot. They were the third class of third graders to have gone through the Eye-Color Exercise with Jane. They were now reuniting to discuss fourteen years after the fact what impact the exercise had on their lives. When they had first gone through the exercise in 1970 ABC made a documentary about it called the Eye of the Storm. At this 1984 reunion they watched the film again and talked about the impact the exercise had on their lives with Jane. After the discussion A Class Divided goes on to a Sociology Class being taught in Stormville, New York where some Prisoner/Students watch the film and give their reactions to their teacher. Lastly the video shows Jane Elliot putting some employees from the Iowa Department of Corrections through the Eye-Color Exercise. The video ends with some closing comments from Jane. So to review A Class Divided has three main parts:
1.The 1984 Class Reunion and their reactions to the impact of the Eye-Color Exercise on their lives.
2.The showing of the Eye of the Storm to a Sociology Class at the Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York and their reactions to the film and
3.The Iowa Department of Corrections being put through Jane’s exercise and their reactions to it.
Jane Elliot’s Eye-Color Exercise was first conceived when she had been talking about racism with her college roommate in the early 1960s. She said she had gotten into an argument with her father about racism and it then occurred to her that discriminating against someone on the basis of skin color was a ridiculous as discriminating against someone on the basis of eye-color. They’re basically the same thing. Jane for most of her life had been an ardent anti-racist and a supporter of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights struggle. When Jane graduated from college she became a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa. Aside from teaching the regular subjects: English Reading, Writing, Math, and History she taught them things about Indians, African-Americans, and the Civil Rights struggle. She made her class so much fun for her students that they even asked her seriously once if they could just stay overnight at the school rather than go home. Jane said she had finally decided to do the Eye-Color Exercise with them when,”On the day after Martin Luther King was killed (April 5, 1968) one of my students came into the room and said they shot that King Mrs. Elliot.”
“Why did they shoot that King?””I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way not just talk about it because we had talked about racism since the first day of school but the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our Heroes-Of-The-Month in February could not be just talked about and explained away.””There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.” “As I listened to the White-Commentators on T.V. the night before I was hearing things like who’s going to hold your people together as they interviewed Black leaders. “Uh, what are they going to do?””Who’s going to control your people?””As though this was, these
people were Sub-Human and someone was going to have to step in there and control
them.””They said things like when we lost our leader his widow helped to hold us together.””Who’s going to hold them together and the attitude was so arrogant and so
condescending and so ungodly that I thought if White-Male Adults react this way what
are my third graders going to do?””How are they going to react to this thing?””I was ironing the Tee-Pee.””We studied an Indian Unit.””We made a Tee-Pee every year.””The first year the students would make the Tee-Pee out of pieces of sheet and we would sew it
together and the next year we would decorate it with Indian symbols.””I was ironing the previous year’s Tee-Pee getting it ready to be decorated the next day and I thought of what we had done with the Indians.””We haven’t made much progress in these two hundred, three hundred years.””And I thought this was the time now to teach them really what the Sioux Indian Prayer that says Oh Great Spirit keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins really means and for the next day I knew my children were going to have to walk in someone else’s moccasins.””I decided at that point that it was time to try the Eye-Color thing which I had thought about many time but had never used so the next day I introduced an Eye-Color Exercise in my classroom and split the class according to Eye-Color and immediately created a microcosm of society in a third grade classroom.”
Jane then split her class for two days into Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes. During those two days the Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes would take turns as the Superior and Inferior groups. At the end of the exercise they would come back together and discuss how it felt to discriminate and be discriminated against. The third time Jane taught the Eye-Color Exercise to her third graders ABC sent a film crew to make a documentary about it called the Eye of the Storm. This documentary is now used nation and worldwide to teach people working in Education, Government, and Business about discrimination. The Eye of the Storm begins with her class singing God Bless America.
Jane then says,”this week is National Brotherhood Week.””What is Brotherhood?” The kids say,”be kind to your brothers.” Jane says,”and how should you be kind to your brothers?””Treat them the way you want to be treated,”the kids say. “Treat everyone as if they were your brother.” Jane then asks if there is,”anyone in the United States that we do not treat as our brother?” One boy says,”the Black people.” A little girl says,”the Indians.” Jane, her students, and the people of Riceville, Iowa are all white by the way. Jane then goes on to say,”when people see a Black person or a Yellow person or a Red person what do they say?” A little girl says,”look at that, dumb people,”while raising her upper-lip and giving Jane a smile. “What kind of things do they say about Black people,” Jane says. One boy says,”their Niggers.” “In the city, in many places in the United States how are Blacks treated?””How are Indians treated?” A boy says,”they don’t get anything in this world.””Why is that Jane says?””Because they’re a different color.”
“Do you know what it would feel like to be treated different because of the color of your skin?””Yeah,” a boy mistakenly says. “Do you,” Jane says? “No I don’t think
you would know unless you’ve been through it would you?””It might be interesting today to judge people by the color of their eyes.””Would you like to try this?””Yeah,”all the kids say. “Since I’m the teacher and I have Blue-Eyes I think the people with Blue-Eyes should be on top the first day.””I mean the Blue-Eyed people are the better people in this room.””Uh Uhhhhh,”one boy says. “Oh yes they are.””Blue-Eyed people are smarter than Brown-Eyed people.””My dad’s not smart he’s stupid,” the boy says. “Is your dad Brown-Eyed?””Yes,” the boy says. “One day you came to school and said he kicked you.””He did,”the boy says. “Do you think a Blue-Eyed father would kick his son?” “Yep, my dad would,”the boy says smiling.””My dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked me, Greg’s dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked him, Rex’s dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked him.””This is a fact.””Blue-Eyed people are better than Brown-Eyed people.” The boy shakes his head no. “Are you sure that your right?” The boy smiles and shakes his head yes. “Why, what makes you so sure that your right?” He just smiles and says,”I don’t know,” and turns his head.
She then begins the exercise by splitting up the kids into Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes. The first day of the exercise is on a Tuesday. The Blue-Eyes are the Superior group and get to sit in the front rows of the classroom. The Brown-Eyes have to sit in the back rows and wear green-collars around their arms or neck to mark them as inferior. The things Jane says about the Brown-Eyes during the exercise are:
1.They are not as good as the Blue-Eyes.
2.They are not as smart as the Blue-Eyes.
3.Blue-Eyes don’t abuse their children.
4.Brown-Eyed people are lazy and dumb.
5.A Blue-Eyed boy says Jane should use the yard stick to discipline the Brown-Eyes when they misbehave and she agrees.
6.Brown-Eyes don’t get seconds for lunch because they might take too much.
7.The Brown-Eyes have to go to lunch after the Blue-Eyes.
8.Brown-Eyed kids get five minutes less of recess than the Blue-Eyes.
9.The Brown-Eyed kids are not allowed to play with the Blue-Eyed kids on the playground because they are inferior.
During the Eye of the Storm documentary the kids were allowed to comment on what they were feeling about the exercise while they were going through it. One boy said,”it seemed like when we were on the bottom everything bad was happening to us.””You feel like the way they were treating us you didn’t even want to try to do anything.” A girl said,”it feels like Mrs. Elliot was taking our best friends away from us.” When they were back in the class they discussed a fight that had broken out on the playground between a Brown-Eyed boy and a Blue-Eyed boy. John, the Brown-Eyed boy, hit Russell, a Blue-Eyed boy in the gut for calling him Brown-Eyes.
Jane asked John if hitting Russell made him stop calling him Brown-Eyes or feel better. John said no it did not stop him or make him feel better. The Brown-Eyed kids said like Russell some of the Blue-Eyed kids had teased them. One boy described it as being like when White people call Black people Niggers. On day two, Wednesday, Jane told the Blue-Eyed kids,”yesterday I told you, you were better than the Brown-Eyes. I lied to you. A Blue-Eyed boy sighs mournfully,”oh boy,””Brown-Eyes are actually better than Blue-Eyes,” Jane says. “You Brown-Eyes may now take off your collars and put them on a Blue-Eyed person.” The Brown-Eyed instantly leaped out of their chairs like rockets and gleefully put their collars on the Blue-Eyed kids. Jane then says one of the Blue-Eyed boys said the other day,”boy I like to hit my little sister as hard as I can that’s fun!” Before each exercise Jane always seems to want to come up with a compelling reason as to why the inferior group is deserving of their coming persecution. She then goes on to say the following things about the Blue-Eyes now that they are the inferior group:
1.The Blue-Eyes are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at recess.
2.The Blue-Eyes now get five fewer minutes of recess than the Brown-Eyes.
3.Blue-Eyes abuse their siblings.
4.Blue-Eyes forget their glasses and thus come to school unprepared to learn unlike the Brown-Eyes.
5.The Blue-Eyes are not supposed to play with the Brown-Eyes because the Brown-Eyes are smarter, better, and know how to sit in a chair and pay attention.
6.Blue-Eyed people learn slower than Brown-Eyed people.
7.Blue-Eyes are wasteful. They throw away paper drinking cups instead of saving them and writing their name on them.
8.Blue-Eyes are not allowed to use the drinking fountain without a paper drinking cup. They might give a Brown-Eyed kid a disease because they are not clean.
Suprisingly the Brown-Eyed kids did not take this time to get revenge on the Blue-Eyed kids. Having felt the lash of discrimination they were not eager to inflict the same amount of pain on their classmates. Thus if this is any kind of example it dispels the myth that if minorities ever got any kind of equal rights they would discriminate against whites the same way whites discriminated against them. At the end of the second and last day of the exercise Jane asked the Blue-Eyes,”what did you Blue people find out today?” The Blue-Eyes had to wear Blue collars. “I know what they felt like yesterday,” one Blue-Eyed boy said. “I did too yuuuuuk,”another said. “How did they feel yesterday?””Down,” one boy said. “Like a dog on a leash.””It felt like your chained up in a prison and your throwing away the key.””Should the color of some other person’s eyes have anything to do with how you treat them,” Jane asks? “No,”the kids say. “All right then should the color of their skin?””No,”the kids say. “Should you judge people by the color of their skin?””No,” the kids say. “You’re going to say that today and this week and probably all the time your in this classroom.””You’ll say no Mrs. Elliot.” “Every time I ask that question then when you see a Black man or an Indian or someone walking down the street are you gonna say ha ha look at that silly looking thing.” “No,”the kids say. “Does it make any difference whether their skin is Black or White or Yellow or Red?”
“No,”the kids say. “Is that how you decide whether people are good or bad?” “No,” the kids say. “Is that what makes people good or bad?””No,” the kids say. “Let’s take these collars.” “What would you like to do with them,” she asks the kids? “Throw them away,” the kids say! “Go ahead!” “Now you know a little more than you knew at the beginning of this week.” “Yeah,”the kids say. “This isn’t a easy way to learn this is it?””No Mrs. Elliot,” the kids yell! “Oh will you stop it,” Jane says to the kids while they laugh. “Okay now let’s all sit down here together Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes.” The girls sit down on the floor in front of Jane while the boys link arms around each other’s shoulders in back of them. “Does it make any difference what color you are?” “No,”the kids say. One Blue-Eyed boy is still throwing his collar away and they all look over at him while he tries to tear it apart with his teeth. “Oh you found your brand huh,” Jane says to him while the other kids laugh. “Okay ready to listen up,” Jane asks them while the boy sits down? “Okay are you back?” “Yeah,” the kids yell! “That feel better?” “Yeah,” the kids say.” “Does the color of eyes that you have make any difference in the kind of person you are?””No Mrs. Elliot, the kids say. “Does that feel like being home again girls?””Yes Mrs. Elliot the boys yell!””Oh will you stop it.” This is where the Eye of the Storm part of Frontline A Class Divided ends and then goes into the next segment about the class reunion in 1984.
JANE SHOWS HOW DISCRIMINATION NEGATIVELY IMPACTS A CHILD’S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
During the exercise Jane did the small group flash card pack learning exercise she regularly does with her kids. She noticed that when the kids were in the Superior group their performance went up and when in the Inferior group it went down. The Brown-Eyed kids took five minutes to get through the card pack on Tuesday when they were the Inferior group. It took them only two and a half minutes on Wednesday when they were the Superior group. A class record. The Blue-Eyes took three minutes to get through the card pack on Tuesday when they were the Superior group. They took four minutes when they were the Inferior group. One of the Blue-Eyed boys said,”I knew we weren’t going to make it.””How long did it take you yesterday,” Jane said?”Three minutes,” the kids said. “Three minutes how long did it take you to get through it today?””Four minutes and eighteen seconds.””What happened?””Went down,” one of the Blue-Eyes said. “Why?””What were you thinking of?””This,”a Blue-Eyed boy said pointing to his Blue Collar. “I hate today,” Jane says. “You hate it I hate it too,” one of the Blue-Eyed boys says sarcastically. The other kids laugh. “Because I’m Blue-Eyed,” Jane says. “I am too,”one of the boys says. “It’s not funny.””It’s not fun.””It’s not pleasant.””This is a filthy nasty word called discrimination.””Were treating people a certain way because their different from the rest of us.””Is that fair?””No,”the kids say. “Nothing fair about it,”Jane says. “We didn’t say this was going to be a fair day did we.””No,”the kids say. “And it isn’t.””It’s a horrid day,”Jane says. The reason for the Brown-Eyes success with the card pack on the second day was they didn’t have to think about the green collars anymore. They did not have to think about their teacher looking at them as Inferior people or punishing them verbally for every mistake they made.
After the second year Jand did the exercise she sent Spelling, Math, and Reading Tests she gave her class to the Stanford University Psychology Department for a informal review and analysis. She sent them tests that she gave to the class two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise, and two weeks after the exercise. Jane said,”almost without exception their scores go up on the day they are on the top.””Down the day they are on the bottom and maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after the exercise.” The Stanford Psychology Department told Jane that the kids academic ability is being changed in a twenty-four hour period and that isn’t possible but it’s happening. Something very strange is happening to your third graders. Jane said what happened to the kids was the ones who had previously been quiet were more vocal and assertive during the exercise when they were in the Superior group. Kids who also had previously underperformed on their academic work started to do better when they were given special treatment by Jane. In her own words the exercise had shown them how really great they are and were then responding to what they now knew they were able to do. This happened consistently with her third graders throughout all of the time she put them through the exercise. Since 1968 when Jane did the exercise for the first time 300 students have gone through the exercise in Riceville, Iowa until the day she retired from teaching.
THE CLASS REUNION OF AUGUST 1984
At the class reunion of August 1984 Jane met with eleven of the students she had done the exercise with in the Eye of the Storm documentary. They put their chairs in a circle and discussed the experience fourteen years after they had originally done the exercise. Jane began the discussion by saying,”All right Raymond why?””I want to know why you were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids?””At the end of the day I thought the miserable little Nazi.” Everyone in the room laughs. “Really I just couldn’t stand you.””It felt tremendously evil,”Raymond said. “All of your inhibitions were gone and even though they were my friends or not any pent up hostilities or aggressions these kids have ever caused you, you could get them out.” As a kid after the second day he said,”I felt like a King like I ruled those Brown-Eyes.””Like I was better than them.””Happy.” Jane asks them how they, the Blue-Eyes, felt when they were the out-group. A woman with short brown hair says,”you want to talk about hating somebody woo-hoo it was there.””Hating me,” Jane says. “Yeah for what you were putting us through.””Nobody likes to be hated or looked down upon, teased or discriminated against and it just boggles up inside you.””You just get so mad.””Were you just angry or was it more than that,” Jane says? “I felt demoralized, humiliated,” Raymond said. “Is the learning worth the pain,” Jane asks them? Everybody says yes. “It made everything different than what it was.” “We was a lot better family even in our houses we was probably because uh, it was hard on you.””When you have your best friend one day and then he’s your enemy the next it brings it out real quick in you,” Roy Wilson says. “Some of the remarks were the things I wished I could have programmed into them.””They’re the things I would have wanted them to say.””Some of the things were just mind blowing,” Jane says in a off-camera commentary. “You know you hear these different people talking about uh, you know different people, how their different.””How they’d like to have them out of the country.””I wish they’d go back to Africa you know and stuff.”
“I wish I just had the collar in my pocket I could whip it out and put it on them and say wear this.””And put yourself in their place.””I wish they would go through what I went through,” a woman with feathered hair said. “We was at a softball game a couple of weekends ago and there was a Black there and I said Hey Burley and we hugged and everything .””And some people really looked at us like what are you doing with him.”
“You know you just get this burning feeling, sensation and you just want to let it out and put them through what we went through to find out their not any different,”a woman with short black hair said. “I would be by myself sometimes when I see some people together and I see how they act you know I think well that’s Black.””And then right in the next second I won’t even finish the thought I’m saying well I’ve seen white’s do it.””I’ve seen other people do it.””It’s not just the Blacks it’s everyone acts differently.””It’s just a different color is what hits you first and then later as I said I won’t even finish that thought before I remember back when I was like that and I remember not everyone acts the same way.””It’s just your way of thinking is the difference,” a woman with dark brown hair and glasses said. “Like when my grandparents or somebody and they start talking about old times and they say the Japs and all this and that and they start holding that against them.””I think how would you like to have been them?””Japanese-Americans get thrown into this camp just because they happen to be part Japanese.””You know I just said calm down and think about it but when they get older they’re se in their ways and they’re not going to change,”Sheila said. “When you get older,” Jane said? I’ll be set in my ways but their different for their ways.”
“I was absolutely enthralled,” Jane said off-camera. “Sandy Doleman’s statements that when my son comes home with the word Nigger and the other things he hears downtown I say to him listen that isn’t the way we judge people.” “You don’t judge people by how they look.””You judge them by what’s on their inside not their outside.”
“I’m glad that she’s teaching them not to hate because even though he does hear this from the other people if he goes home and thinks well mom and dad like the Black people.””I’m gonna like them too so I don’t think he’s gonna pick up nothing bad about it,” a guy with short dark hair said. “You chose you husband well,”Jane says. Everyone laughs. “He chose me,” the woman with feathered hair says laughingly. “You chose her well,” Jane says. “The kids will take and they’ll listen to a lot of other people too you know so their gonna end up kind of confused over it,” a guy with brown hair and mustache says. “But if she keeps on telling him is he going to be the kind of person you kids are or is he going to be the kind of person who will judge people by the color of their skin,” Jane said. “Well he’ll know somewhat right from wrong,” the guy with brown hair and mustache said. “He’ll know this but he’ll have the ideas.” “He won’t be judging them by their color but he won’t know what we know fully having been through it,” Sheila said. “He won’t learn the collar thing.””The prejudice for us,”the woman with brown hair and glasses said. “He won’t learn prejudice first handed,” Sheila said. “He won’t learn to be prejudiced from us,” the woman with brown hair and glasses said. “I mean they won’t learn to discriminate between people from us.””They might hear it from other people but never from us.””Okay what’s it like to be married to someone like that,” Jane said? Everyone laughs. “When I was gonna marry Sheila I know for my future that I was going to go into the military.””At first I thought is she going to be able to handle being with all the different nationalities.”
“An then I read the storm.””The book.””A Class Divided,” Jane said. “A Class Divided before we got married and before I joined the Army and I said she’s not gonna have any problems.””Should every child have the exercise or every teacher,” Jane says to everybody? “Everybody,” everyone says. “I think every school ought to implement something like this program into their early stages of education.” From this point Frontline: A Class Divided shifts to the Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.
REACTIONS OF THE SOCIOLOGY STUDENTS AT GREENHAVEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY IN STORMVILLE, NEW YORK TO A SHOWING OF EYE OF THE STORM
The video now goes to a Maximum Security prison called Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York where a Sociology class being taught by Professor Duane W. Smith. He has shown his students there the Eye of the Storm film for ten of the years that he has taught there. The narrator says this is the most unusual example of a setting in which the film has been used. The students in his class tend to be Blacks and Hispanics. They watch the film and then Professor Smith asks them,”Do you think the children by this process really learned the meaning of discrimination?””Most of the children before the film started they played and lived together in harmony and uh, certain actions coming from the teacher and seeing the teacher as a authoritarian figure and someone to respect they accepted the views that was given to them but I think at the end of the lesson they could clearly see that prejudices and other forms of discrimination are things people build within their minds that there not actual physical barriers that say yo you can’t cross the street,” a Black man with a beard said. “The one kid I could really agree with was at recess.””He was a Brown-Eyed kid.””He had this inner-turmoil against this feeling of being divided or prejudiced against where he would hit another kid that he’s known for so many year in the gut.””Whether he also stated that it didn’t help any so that automatically should be a lesson to every adult in the world.””Violence doesn’t help any and I hope this is a film my children get to see,” a Black man with glasses and a goatee said. The next and last part of the video is about the employees of the Iowa Department of Corrections going through Jane’s Eye Color Exercise and giving their reactions to what they learned from it.
JANE GIVE THE BLUES. THE BLUES. THE EMPLOYEES OF THE IOWA STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS AND THEIR REACTIONS TO THE EYE COLOR EXERCISE
The population of the state of Iowa is 98% White yet African-Americans compose 20% of the population in their prisons. It is because of this they hired Jane Elliot to come in and give their employees some sensitivity training by running them through her exercise. They were only told they were attending a day long workshop so they don’t know they are about to be ambushed in Jane’s Eye Color Exercise. One of the employees, David Stokesbury, noticed right away that the Brown-Eyes were the special group. They had their own restrooms and lots of places to sit down outside the workshop. The Blue-Eyes were given green collars to wear before the workshop began.
David said it was apparent before the workshop began that they were to be in the deprived group. The workshop was supposed to begin at 9 a.m. The Brown-Eyes were allowed to go in first while the Blue-Eyes had to stand outside waiting. There were plenty of stacked chairs outside that the Blue-Eyes could have used but David said he was too scared to take one down because he might get in trouble. The Blue-Eyes had to wait for twenty minutes before they could come in. They were talking while they waited and then a attendant came up and harassed them. He said you guys need to keep it down out here there are people in the workshop right now. I don’t know how many times I have to come out here and tell you but you need to keep it down. While the Blue-Eyes waited Jane prepared the Brown-Eyes on what to do when they came in. She told the Brown-Eyes the exercise would not work without their cooperation so they needed to help her by playing along when she discriminated against them. She then started to tell them negative things about the Blue-Eyes which were:
1.The Blue-Eyes aren’t allowed to smoke.
2.Blue-Eyed people aren’t allowed to sit in the empty chairs behind the Brown-Eyed section because they smell and you don’t know what kind of disease you might catch from them.
When the Blue-Eyes came in the women were told to put their purses in a corner at the back of the room and they all had to put their coats in a closet. This was done to set them up to be discriminated against by Jane as they were not told they would need some paper and a pen to take notes during the workshop. As they sat down in the Brown-Eyed section in the back rows Jane told them that it would be to their benefit if they got to meetings on time in the future. This was an obvious act of discrimination/ambush since they were on time and the reason they were late was because she didn’t let them in with the Blue-Eyes. Nobody in the Blue-Eyed group pointed this out to her possibly because she took them by surprise. Jane noticed one Blue-Eyed woman was chewing gum and she told her to spit it out and get rid of it. The woman said she doesn’t have anywhere to put it. She didn’t have anywhere to put it because Jane made sure her purse was taken away before everything began. The woman having no place to put the gum set it on the arm of her chair. Jane then says,”All right I want everybody to look at where she put her gum.””This is a typical Blue-Eyed thing to do you give them something nice and they just wreck it.” Jane then goes on to list the faults of Blue-Eyed people as being poor listeners and they don’t take anything seriously. They’re incapable of doing anything right and are always the class clown or poor students. She then goes on to say the first thing you have to do when you are teaching or working in a segregated situation is to teach the Blue-Eyes the Good Listening Skills. They are:
1.Good listeners have quiet feet, hands, and mouths.
2.Good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking.
3.Good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end.
4.Good listeners decide to learn something.
Everyone was supposed to be taking notes while Jane spoke. Roger, a Blue-Eyed man, doesn’t because he didn’t know he was supposed to bring a pen and paper. No one else had a pen or paper to loan him so that he could. He also didn’t have a chair to sit on so even if he had a pen and some paper it would have been difficult for him to take notes as he stood in the back of the room. There are empty chairs in the Brown-Eyed section but the Blues are not allowed to use them. Jane attacks him for this as an example of a lazy Blue-Eye who is choosing not to learn anything. She says he is playing a favorite Blue-Eyed game,”playing it cool nothing can bother me man I’m gonna ignore this whole thing.” Jane asks the Brown-Eyes what they think of the Blue-Eyes. “They are stubborn, inconsiderate, self-centered, and wish to control as much of their surroundings as possible.””I don’t understand why we have to have them here,” a Black man with glasses says. “We have them here because we have to have them here,” Jane says. “Oh we have to huh?””You have to.””This is one of the things you have to put up with.” Jane then goes on to say to the Brown-Eyes some of you have had trouble with Blue-Eyes either in the workplace or at home does any of you have an example of this? A Brown-Eyed woman with short brown hair named Sandy says she has two nephews. One is Brown-Eyed and one is Blue-Eyed. The Blue-Eyed one is real lazy and never cleans his room. He doesn’t seem to have any energy. The Brown-Eyed one is outgoing, a good athlete, and just a better all around kid so she hopes when she has kids they have Brown-Eyes. Jane says,”Well when the time comes you know what to do right.” Which is marry a Brown-Eyed man. In other words marry your own kind. Jane says to the Brown-Eyes if you are in a situation where Blue-Eyes are constantly refusing to obey the person in authority what do you know about them? A Brown-Eyed man in a Brown coat and glasses said it is a Blue-Eyed game for attention. It causes disrespect from the Brown-Eyed people for the Blue-Eyed people. This was being said about Roger because he could not get a pen and paper to take notes. Jane is still holding him up as an example of Blue-Eyes who can not learn or listen. The man says this is a typical trait of a Blue-Eyed person. Jane asks the Brown-Eyes what have you learned here about Blue-Eyed people that you didn’t know before? A Black man with a beard answers,”I find that I’m going to have to explain things a little more explicitly to a Blue-Eyed person than a Brown-Eyed person. Jane asks him,”how many times did I have to list the listening skills for Roger?” The man says,”well brother Roger is having a tough time back there today isn’t he?” Everyone laughs. “Six or Seven times.”
Jane then had everyone take a written test. When the tests are collected three women did not put their full names on their tests. She says to the women,”You know what you do to the image of Blues is unfortunate.””What you three people do to the image of women with your behavior really makes me angry.””The fact that you do this kind of thing and this kind of sloppy work reflects badly on women.””I resent that doubly.” A woman named Karen says,”Uh, maam I really appreciate it if you would call us by name when you say you three people we don’t know who your speaking to it could be anyone here.””My dear if you wanted me to call you by name you’d have put your name on your paper,” Jane said while pointing her pen at her. It’s on my,”Karen says while showing her name tag to her. “It was to be on your paper,” Jane says. “That’s right,” Karen says. “All right now how can one call you by your name if you don’t care enough about your name to put it on your paper don’t expect me to worry about it.””You don’t know how to read,” Karen says?
“Don’t expect me to worry about it if you don’t put it on your paper.””Your being totally unrealistic.” “I don’t remember saying my name was important to me I remember saying I’d like to know who your speaking to when you say you three,” Karen said. “Then what should you do,” Jane said. “Ask you to use my name which I did.””And where should your name have been,” Jane said. “Right where it is,” Karen said while showing her, her name tag again. “On your paper,” Jane said? “And on my birth-certificate,” Karen said. “Is it on your paper,” Jane said? “No maam,” Karen said.
“Where did you get a birth-certificate,” Jane asked? “Out of a slot-machine same as you lady,” Karen says. Everybody laughs. “I think your probably right about your own,” Jane shoots back. “At least I know who my parents are maam,” Karen says.
Jane then says to a Brown-Eyed Asian man,”is she being rude?” He says,”yes.”
“She being inconsiderate?” He says,”very.””She being uncooperative?” He says,”very.”
“She being insulting?” He says,”yes.””Are all those the things that we’ve accused Blue-Eyed people of being?” He says,”yes.””Is she proving that were right?””Yes,”he says. Jane puts her hands palms out as if to say I just proved my point. She then asks the audience,”does anyone have any comments to make at this point?””Do you feel that there are important Blue-Eyed people,”a man with short hair says? “There are exceptions to every rule,” Jane says. “What are those exceptions,” the man says? “There are a few important Blue-Eyed people.””Very few,”the man says. “Do you think that you are one of them,” a woman named Janine says? “No,” Jane says. “Why are you up there then,” the man says. “I’m Blue-Eyed the difference between you and me is I have a Brown-Eyed husband and Brown-Eyed offspring and I’ve learned how to behave in a Brown-Eyed society and when you can act Brown enough then you too can be where I am,” Jane says. “I wouldn’t want to be where you are,” Karen says. “Are you certain,” Jane says?
“Absolutely positive,” Karen says. “You like where you are,” Jane says? “I love where I am,” Karen says. “You like it so much that you don’t even identify yourself on your paper,” Jane says? “I don’t need to lady,” Karen says. “Her using the term lady where I’m concerned what do you think she’s trying to do?””Is it ignorance or deliberately insulting,” Jane says to a Brown-Eyed woman in a red sweater? “I would say it was deliberately insulting,” the woman says giving her a big friendly smile. “If it’s ignorance she need to be taught that to many of us the word lady is a pejorative (having or indicating a disparaging meaning),” Jane says. “I don’t appreciate it.””It is um it’s a put-down and it’s used to keep women in their place.””I will call you by your correct name after this I won’t be kind,” Karen says.
“That was kindness on your part.””Yes,” Karen says. “Then you are a true,” Jane says before Karen interrupts her. “Calling someone a lady is a kindness.””Then your problem is ignorance.””You can call me lady anytime you like,”Karen says. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” Jane says. “I know you wouldn’t,” Karen says. “I, I think that and that’s part of the problem is a total lack of awareness at what sexism amounts to and how much you contribute to the sexism that keeps you where you are,” Jane says. Karen pouts her lower lip and nods her head in sarcastic mock agreement until Jane is finished talking. “I like where I am lady,” Karen says pointing her pen at Jane. Everyone laughs. “I did it again didn’t I,” Karen says smiling. Jane smiles too and looks over at David Stokesbury who now has his hand raised and says,”yes.” “I’m getting kind of fed up with this whole bunch of garbage,” David says. “Why,” Jane says? “Brown-Eyed peoples are no different than we are I hate to tell them that they have these false delusions and such.”
“Are they being disruptive,” Jane asks him? “No you trained them very well uh I think that’s what they did with the Storm troopers in Germany also.””You guys do a real good job sitting up there.””Do you think what’s happening here today feels like what it would have felt in Nazi Germany,” Jane asks him? “Yes,” David says. “Where do you think you are in that then?””Where do I think I am,” David asks her? “Who are you?””If we’re in Nazi Germany who are you?””Uh the Jews,”David answers her. Jane then extends her palms out over the podium and dips her head a little bit as if to say now do you get it. After that the group breaks up for lunch and comes back to talk about what they learned from the exercise.
When they come back Jane looks out from behind her podium and asks Roger,”did you learn anything this morning?””I think I learned from the experience feeling like I was in a glass cage and I was powerless.”””There was a sense of hopelessness uh I was angry I wanted to speak up and yet at times I knew if I spoke up I would be back in a powerless situation.””I would be attacked uh a sense of hopelessness,”Roger said. “Had you experienced that before,” Jane said? “I realized this morning that there were very few times in my life that I have been discriminated against very few,”Roger said. “And you were this uncomfortable in a hour and a half,” Jane said.
“I was amazed at how uncomfortable I was in the first fifteen minutes.””Can you empathize at all then with Blacks, minority group members in this country,” Jane said? “I’m hoping better than before.””We tried to argue with you, you would use just the mere argument as reason for us being lesser than the Brown-Eyed folks.””You know you couldn’t win,” David Stokesbury said. “But don’t we do that every day,” Jane said. “I think some do yeah but I would hope that I never get so unreasonable I’d, you know the statements you were making were groundless and such and yet we couldn’t argue with them because if we argued then we were argumentative and you know not listening and getting out of our place and all that stuff and that was frustrating to me and then frustrating to me was the other little green tags were sitting on their hands.””My group here was I didn’t think boisterous enough in our opposition to the whole thing,” David said.
“Why didn’t you people support one another?””Why didn’t the Blue-Eyed people?””The Blue-Eyed people just sat there and let’s face it you covered your ass’s,” Jane said. “Why did you just sit there?’”I think symptomatic of the problem as a whole we see that in society in general.”’We see a few people sitting back waiting to see what they’re going to do,”a man with white hair said. “Okay as long as I was picking on him I was leaving you alone right,” Jane said. “Right,” the man with white hair said. “I’d say a lot of people accept it and let a few people do their fighting for them and they stand back and if this person is going to win then they’ll get on this side but if that person is not gonna win they’ll stay back over here you know that’s just how it works,” Evelyn Riley said. “If you were in a real situation where you had to do something about racism would you stand up and be counted,” Jane said? “What I would do I don’t know it would depend on the exigencies (a situation that demands immediate attention),” the man with white hair said. “But you would do something,” Jane said? “I would have to do something I couldn’t go home and face my kids tonight if I didn’t, the man with white hair said. “How did you Brown-Eyed people feel while this was going on,” Jane said? A sense of relief that I wasn’t a Blue-Eyed person,” a man with a beard and glasses said.
“Sense of relief that you had the right colored eyes absolutely,” Jane said. “I really understood at least I felt I understood what it was like to be in the minority,” a man with short hair said. “Why were you angry,” Jane says to Karen? “First of all because it was unreasonable, secondly because I felt discriminated against, thirdly I think that all of us everyone in this room has dealt with discrimination on both sides.””You don’t have to be Black or Jewish or Mexican or anything else to have felt discrimination in your life and as you become an adult you learn to deal with those feelings within yourself.””You learn to handle those and when you feel yourself uh in a situation that you can’t get out of which we couldn’t.””We were a captive audience and it was not a normal situation because normally you aren’t badgered,” Karen said. “What if you had to spend the rest of your life this way,” Jane said? “I don’t know how to answer that,” Karen sighs. “You don’t wake up every morning knowing that your different,” a woman with long black hair says. “You wake up as a White woman who is going to her job at 8 o’clock or whatever where a black person is gonna wake up knowing from the minute they get up out of the bed and look in the mirror that their Black and they have to deal with the problems they had to deal with ever since they were young and realize that I am different and I have to deal with life differently.””Things are differently for me and I don’t think you can really say that you have felt maybe you have felt some sort of discrimination but you haven’t felt what it is like for a Black woman to go through the daily experiences of arguing and saying listen to me my point of view is good.””You know what I have to offer is good and no one wants to listen because White is right that’s the way things are.” This is the point at which the footage of the exercise ends.
“IF WE REALLY ACTED THAT WAY.” CLOSING COMMENTS BY JANE AT THE END OF THE VIDEO.
“I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime no I don’t want to see it used more widely I want to see the necessity for it wiped out and I think if Educators were determined that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise but I want to see something used.””I’d like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not all students unless, unless it’s done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way.””I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily and I would never suggest that everybody should use it.””I think you could have training classes for teachers bring them in put them through the thing.””Explain what happened do the debriefing and then practice doing this until teachers.””Until a group of teachers were able to do it on their own and I, teachers are not disabled learners they could learn to do this.””Obviously if I can do it most anyone can do it.””It doesn’t take a super-teacher to do this exercise.”
“After you do this exercise when the debriefing starts.””When the pain is over and your all back together and your all one again you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we preach.””If we really acted that way you could feel as good about one another as those kids feel about one another after this exercise is over.””You create instant cousins.””I thought maybe that lasted just while they were in my classroom because of my superior influence but indeed these kids still feel that way about one another.””They said yesterday over and over the remark was made were kind of like a family now.””They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way and they refuse to hurt one another that way again.””And they said were kind of like a family now and indeed we were.” This is the point at which Frontline A Class Divided ends.
THE PRICE SHE PAID
After the first time Jane did the exercise in 1968 she had her students write an essay on what they learned from the exercise. She showed the essays to her mother who in turn shared them with a local newspaper called the Riceville Recorder. The Associated Press picked up the story and a month later Johnny Carson called her to invite her to be on the Tonight Show. Jane made her appearance on the Tonight Show and then went home. She came home to a frosty reception from her fellow teachers and the townspeople. For whatever reason they did not like the attention she had brought to their town. People wrote her letters saying how dare she do this to White children. Black children are used to such abuse but White ones are not. Over the years Jane maintains 80% of the people in Riceville supported her doing the exercise while 20% did not. The 20% though were the most vocal calling and writing her death threats while that other 80% remained quiet. Three of her four children also soon came under attack. Her daughter Mary, twelve years old at the time, came home crying from school because some of her sixth grade classmates had surrounded her and said Jane would soon be having sex with Black men. This is a favorite tactic of bigots. When someone says they sympathize with an oppressed group they must be one of them they say or want to have sex with them. Her son Brian was beaten up at school by a group of boys and her oldest daughter Sarah came out of a restroom stall one day to see the word Nigger Lover written on the mirror in red-lipstick.
In the mid-1970s Jane went to Uniontown, Pennsylvania at the request of a committee there and did the exercise with several hundred teachers. The teachers got so angry afterwards they called the Superintendent and said if you don’t get her out of here were going to shoot her. Three carloads of Black people smuggled her out of town after midnight. The next morning Jane very courageously decided she would never again allow the threats of racists stop her from speaking or running the exercise. She said she has had one White male hit her during the exercise and another pull a knife on her. At a college in Texas a man dressed in combat fatigues ran up to the podium she was speaking at and threatened to someday kill her. “I’ve had lot’s of that kind of stuff,” Jane said. “I’m fully aware that it goes with the territory.””But other people need to realize that this ugliness is still going on and that it’s still dangerous to stand up and be counted.”
THE POSITIVE RESULTS JANE HAS ACCOMPLISHED WITH HER LIFE AND CAREER.
The most significant thing to remember about Jane is that on the morning after Martin Luther King died she had very little money or power. All she had was a third grade classroom but she used it to try and do her part to make a difference. While Jane had some negative experience from her work she has also gotten a lot of positive feedback from her endeavors. After a visit to her old Elementary school in 2003 with writer Stephen G. Bloom, during which she was not allowed to see her old classroom, feeling shunned Jane ran into a former student. Her former student told her she never forgot the exercise and it changed her life for the better. She asked Jane if she could please do the exercise on her grandchildren. Jane was so touched by her remark that tears formed at the corners of her eyes. Few if any of her former students have said that they regretted going through the exercise with Jane or resent her today for putting them through it. And while some feel third grade is too young for a child to go through the exercise very few said they would not want their kids to go through it. When teaching it abroad Jane has said she has also had similar positive experiences. One in particular happened in Germany. A woman from the former East Germany said she did not want to do the exercise because she did not feel it was necessary. Jane put it to a group vote. The group voted to do the exercise. When it was over the woman with tears in her eyes said she was so glad that they did the exercise. She would not have learned as much from the lecture. The reason Germans would need the exercise is because like the United States
Western Europe is becoming increasingly Multi-Cultural due to the recent influxes of immigration from Non-White countries. In Glasgow, Scotland a Black woman came up to Jane after a lecture and said,”you have no idea, you are the first White person ever in my life who has validated what I have said all my life and what I have experienced.””Thank you.” Jane said,”you don’t have to thank me.””Everything I know about this topic I’ve learned from people like you.””It’s I who should be thanking you.” “Oh, but you don’t understand.””These are things that we have been saying for years.””Nobody would tell us that they believed us or that they felt the way we do.””You validated me today.”
THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JANE ELLIOT SINCE EYE OF THE STORM
Jane was born near Riceville, Iowa in 1933. She is of Irish-American descent. She has four children. She taught kids in the third grade from 1968-1977 and then moved up to teach seventh and eighth graders from 1977-1985. In 1985 she requested a leave of absence to go and do the exercise with corporations and government agencies. She was denied a leave of absence so she retired from teaching and went on the road to teach the exercise and give lectures on discrimination. Her first television appearance was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Since then she has been on 60 Minutes and on the Oprah Winfrey Show five times. When not on the road she spends her time at her home in Osage, Iowa or Riverside, California. Frontline A Class Divided still remains the most requested video on PBS.
WEBSITES
In addition to the Frontline A Class Divided documentary there is a Teacher’s Guide website. It’s address is www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided. On the website you can find additional readings and links, tapes and transcripts, and watch the video online. In the teacher’s guide there is: a note to teachers, pre-viewing preparation, viewing the documentary instructions, post-viewing lesson plans, internet and other resources, and a student assignment sheet.
If you would like to visit Jane’s official website it is www.janeelliot.com. At the website you can see a synopsis of her lectures, workshop, and learning materials. You can also buy her five videos there. They are: The Stolen Eye, The Angry Eye, Blue-Eyed, and A Class Divided. You can also get A Class Divided at www.pbs.org. If you would like to contact Jane and invite her up to give a lecture or run the exercise on you her phone number and e-mail address are on her website. She usually charges a fee for this.
WORKS CITED
Frontline A Class Divided, prod. William Peters, one hour, PBS Video 1999, videocassette.
Stephen G. Bloom, Lesson of a Lifetime,”Smithsonian Magazine, September 2005
An Unfinished Crusade An Interview with Jane Elliot,”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/crusade.html
Robert C. Juneau, B.A. History
INTRODUCTION & REVIEW OF THE FIRST PART OF A CLASS DIVIDED
A Class Divided is a video about Jane Elliot’s Eye Color Exercise and how it demonstrates how if feels to be discriminated against. It also shows how discrimination affects people by showing the feedback she gets from people who have been through the exercise. The video begins by showing eleven students from her class who have come to Riceville, Iowa for a High School Reunion in August 1984 for a reunion of their own with their third-grade teacher Jane Elliot. They were the third class of third graders to have gone through the Eye-Color Exercise with Jane. They were now reuniting to discuss fourteen years after the fact what impact the exercise had on their lives. When they had first gone through the exercise in 1970 ABC made a documentary about it called the Eye of the Storm. At this 1984 reunion they watched the film again and talked about the impact the exercise had on their lives with Jane. After the discussion A Class Divided goes on to a Sociology Class being taught in Stormville, New York where some Prisoner/Students watch the film and give their reactions to their teacher. Lastly the video shows Jane Elliot putting some employees from the Iowa Department of Corrections through the Eye-Color Exercise. The video ends with some closing comments from Jane. So to review A Class Divided has three main parts:
1.The 1984 Class Reunion and their reactions to the impact of the Eye-Color Exercise on their lives.
2.The showing of the Eye of the Storm to a Sociology Class at the Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York and their reactions to the film and
3.The Iowa Department of Corrections being put through Jane’s exercise and their reactions to it.
Jane Elliot’s Eye-Color Exercise was first conceived when she had been talking about racism with her college roommate in the early 1960s. She said she had gotten into an argument with her father about racism and it then occurred to her that discriminating against someone on the basis of skin color was a ridiculous as discriminating against someone on the basis of eye-color. They’re basically the same thing. Jane for most of her life had been an ardent anti-racist and a supporter of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights struggle. When Jane graduated from college she became a third grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa. Aside from teaching the regular subjects: English Reading, Writing, Math, and History she taught them things about Indians, African-Americans, and the Civil Rights struggle. She made her class so much fun for her students that they even asked her seriously once if they could just stay overnight at the school rather than go home. Jane said she had finally decided to do the Eye-Color Exercise with them when,”On the day after Martin Luther King was killed (April 5, 1968) one of my students came into the room and said they shot that King Mrs. Elliot.”
“Why did they shoot that King?””I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way not just talk about it because we had talked about racism since the first day of school but the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our Heroes-Of-The-Month in February could not be just talked about and explained away.””There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.” “As I listened to the White-Commentators on T.V. the night before I was hearing things like who’s going to hold your people together as they interviewed Black leaders. “Uh, what are they going to do?””Who’s going to control your people?””As though this was, these
people were Sub-Human and someone was going to have to step in there and control
them.””They said things like when we lost our leader his widow helped to hold us together.””Who’s going to hold them together and the attitude was so arrogant and so
condescending and so ungodly that I thought if White-Male Adults react this way what
are my third graders going to do?””How are they going to react to this thing?””I was ironing the Tee-Pee.””We studied an Indian Unit.””We made a Tee-Pee every year.””The first year the students would make the Tee-Pee out of pieces of sheet and we would sew it
together and the next year we would decorate it with Indian symbols.””I was ironing the previous year’s Tee-Pee getting it ready to be decorated the next day and I thought of what we had done with the Indians.””We haven’t made much progress in these two hundred, three hundred years.””And I thought this was the time now to teach them really what the Sioux Indian Prayer that says Oh Great Spirit keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins really means and for the next day I knew my children were going to have to walk in someone else’s moccasins.””I decided at that point that it was time to try the Eye-Color thing which I had thought about many time but had never used so the next day I introduced an Eye-Color Exercise in my classroom and split the class according to Eye-Color and immediately created a microcosm of society in a third grade classroom.”
Jane then split her class for two days into Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes. During those two days the Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes would take turns as the Superior and Inferior groups. At the end of the exercise they would come back together and discuss how it felt to discriminate and be discriminated against. The third time Jane taught the Eye-Color Exercise to her third graders ABC sent a film crew to make a documentary about it called the Eye of the Storm. This documentary is now used nation and worldwide to teach people working in Education, Government, and Business about discrimination. The Eye of the Storm begins with her class singing God Bless America.
Jane then says,”this week is National Brotherhood Week.””What is Brotherhood?” The kids say,”be kind to your brothers.” Jane says,”and how should you be kind to your brothers?””Treat them the way you want to be treated,”the kids say. “Treat everyone as if they were your brother.” Jane then asks if there is,”anyone in the United States that we do not treat as our brother?” One boy says,”the Black people.” A little girl says,”the Indians.” Jane, her students, and the people of Riceville, Iowa are all white by the way. Jane then goes on to say,”when people see a Black person or a Yellow person or a Red person what do they say?” A little girl says,”look at that, dumb people,”while raising her upper-lip and giving Jane a smile. “What kind of things do they say about Black people,” Jane says. One boy says,”their Niggers.” “In the city, in many places in the United States how are Blacks treated?””How are Indians treated?” A boy says,”they don’t get anything in this world.””Why is that Jane says?””Because they’re a different color.”
“Do you know what it would feel like to be treated different because of the color of your skin?””Yeah,” a boy mistakenly says. “Do you,” Jane says? “No I don’t think
you would know unless you’ve been through it would you?””It might be interesting today to judge people by the color of their eyes.””Would you like to try this?””Yeah,”all the kids say. “Since I’m the teacher and I have Blue-Eyes I think the people with Blue-Eyes should be on top the first day.””I mean the Blue-Eyed people are the better people in this room.””Uh Uhhhhh,”one boy says. “Oh yes they are.””Blue-Eyed people are smarter than Brown-Eyed people.””My dad’s not smart he’s stupid,” the boy says. “Is your dad Brown-Eyed?””Yes,” the boy says. “One day you came to school and said he kicked you.””He did,”the boy says. “Do you think a Blue-Eyed father would kick his son?” “Yep, my dad would,”the boy says smiling.””My dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked me, Greg’s dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked him, Rex’s dad is Blue-Eyed and he’s never kicked him.””This is a fact.””Blue-Eyed people are better than Brown-Eyed people.” The boy shakes his head no. “Are you sure that your right?” The boy smiles and shakes his head yes. “Why, what makes you so sure that your right?” He just smiles and says,”I don’t know,” and turns his head.
She then begins the exercise by splitting up the kids into Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes. The first day of the exercise is on a Tuesday. The Blue-Eyes are the Superior group and get to sit in the front rows of the classroom. The Brown-Eyes have to sit in the back rows and wear green-collars around their arms or neck to mark them as inferior. The things Jane says about the Brown-Eyes during the exercise are:
1.They are not as good as the Blue-Eyes.
2.They are not as smart as the Blue-Eyes.
3.Blue-Eyes don’t abuse their children.
4.Brown-Eyed people are lazy and dumb.
5.A Blue-Eyed boy says Jane should use the yard stick to discipline the Brown-Eyes when they misbehave and she agrees.
6.Brown-Eyes don’t get seconds for lunch because they might take too much.
7.The Brown-Eyes have to go to lunch after the Blue-Eyes.
8.Brown-Eyed kids get five minutes less of recess than the Blue-Eyes.
9.The Brown-Eyed kids are not allowed to play with the Blue-Eyed kids on the playground because they are inferior.
During the Eye of the Storm documentary the kids were allowed to comment on what they were feeling about the exercise while they were going through it. One boy said,”it seemed like when we were on the bottom everything bad was happening to us.””You feel like the way they were treating us you didn’t even want to try to do anything.” A girl said,”it feels like Mrs. Elliot was taking our best friends away from us.” When they were back in the class they discussed a fight that had broken out on the playground between a Brown-Eyed boy and a Blue-Eyed boy. John, the Brown-Eyed boy, hit Russell, a Blue-Eyed boy in the gut for calling him Brown-Eyes.
Jane asked John if hitting Russell made him stop calling him Brown-Eyes or feel better. John said no it did not stop him or make him feel better. The Brown-Eyed kids said like Russell some of the Blue-Eyed kids had teased them. One boy described it as being like when White people call Black people Niggers. On day two, Wednesday, Jane told the Blue-Eyed kids,”yesterday I told you, you were better than the Brown-Eyes. I lied to you. A Blue-Eyed boy sighs mournfully,”oh boy,””Brown-Eyes are actually better than Blue-Eyes,” Jane says. “You Brown-Eyes may now take off your collars and put them on a Blue-Eyed person.” The Brown-Eyed instantly leaped out of their chairs like rockets and gleefully put their collars on the Blue-Eyed kids. Jane then says one of the Blue-Eyed boys said the other day,”boy I like to hit my little sister as hard as I can that’s fun!” Before each exercise Jane always seems to want to come up with a compelling reason as to why the inferior group is deserving of their coming persecution. She then goes on to say the following things about the Blue-Eyes now that they are the inferior group:
1.The Blue-Eyes are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at recess.
2.The Blue-Eyes now get five fewer minutes of recess than the Brown-Eyes.
3.Blue-Eyes abuse their siblings.
4.Blue-Eyes forget their glasses and thus come to school unprepared to learn unlike the Brown-Eyes.
5.The Blue-Eyes are not supposed to play with the Brown-Eyes because the Brown-Eyes are smarter, better, and know how to sit in a chair and pay attention.
6.Blue-Eyed people learn slower than Brown-Eyed people.
7.Blue-Eyes are wasteful. They throw away paper drinking cups instead of saving them and writing their name on them.
8.Blue-Eyes are not allowed to use the drinking fountain without a paper drinking cup. They might give a Brown-Eyed kid a disease because they are not clean.
Suprisingly the Brown-Eyed kids did not take this time to get revenge on the Blue-Eyed kids. Having felt the lash of discrimination they were not eager to inflict the same amount of pain on their classmates. Thus if this is any kind of example it dispels the myth that if minorities ever got any kind of equal rights they would discriminate against whites the same way whites discriminated against them. At the end of the second and last day of the exercise Jane asked the Blue-Eyes,”what did you Blue people find out today?” The Blue-Eyes had to wear Blue collars. “I know what they felt like yesterday,” one Blue-Eyed boy said. “I did too yuuuuuk,”another said. “How did they feel yesterday?””Down,” one boy said. “Like a dog on a leash.””It felt like your chained up in a prison and your throwing away the key.””Should the color of some other person’s eyes have anything to do with how you treat them,” Jane asks? “No,”the kids say. “All right then should the color of their skin?””No,”the kids say. “Should you judge people by the color of their skin?””No,” the kids say. “You’re going to say that today and this week and probably all the time your in this classroom.””You’ll say no Mrs. Elliot.” “Every time I ask that question then when you see a Black man or an Indian or someone walking down the street are you gonna say ha ha look at that silly looking thing.” “No,”the kids say. “Does it make any difference whether their skin is Black or White or Yellow or Red?”
“No,”the kids say. “Is that how you decide whether people are good or bad?” “No,” the kids say. “Is that what makes people good or bad?””No,” the kids say. “Let’s take these collars.” “What would you like to do with them,” she asks the kids? “Throw them away,” the kids say! “Go ahead!” “Now you know a little more than you knew at the beginning of this week.” “Yeah,”the kids say. “This isn’t a easy way to learn this is it?””No Mrs. Elliot,” the kids yell! “Oh will you stop it,” Jane says to the kids while they laugh. “Okay now let’s all sit down here together Blue-Eyes and Brown-Eyes.” The girls sit down on the floor in front of Jane while the boys link arms around each other’s shoulders in back of them. “Does it make any difference what color you are?” “No,”the kids say. One Blue-Eyed boy is still throwing his collar away and they all look over at him while he tries to tear it apart with his teeth. “Oh you found your brand huh,” Jane says to him while the other kids laugh. “Okay ready to listen up,” Jane asks them while the boy sits down? “Okay are you back?” “Yeah,” the kids yell! “That feel better?” “Yeah,” the kids say.” “Does the color of eyes that you have make any difference in the kind of person you are?””No Mrs. Elliot, the kids say. “Does that feel like being home again girls?””Yes Mrs. Elliot the boys yell!””Oh will you stop it.” This is where the Eye of the Storm part of Frontline A Class Divided ends and then goes into the next segment about the class reunion in 1984.
JANE SHOWS HOW DISCRIMINATION NEGATIVELY IMPACTS A CHILD’S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
During the exercise Jane did the small group flash card pack learning exercise she regularly does with her kids. She noticed that when the kids were in the Superior group their performance went up and when in the Inferior group it went down. The Brown-Eyed kids took five minutes to get through the card pack on Tuesday when they were the Inferior group. It took them only two and a half minutes on Wednesday when they were the Superior group. A class record. The Blue-Eyes took three minutes to get through the card pack on Tuesday when they were the Superior group. They took four minutes when they were the Inferior group. One of the Blue-Eyed boys said,”I knew we weren’t going to make it.””How long did it take you yesterday,” Jane said?”Three minutes,” the kids said. “Three minutes how long did it take you to get through it today?””Four minutes and eighteen seconds.””What happened?””Went down,” one of the Blue-Eyes said. “Why?””What were you thinking of?””This,”a Blue-Eyed boy said pointing to his Blue Collar. “I hate today,” Jane says. “You hate it I hate it too,” one of the Blue-Eyed boys says sarcastically. The other kids laugh. “Because I’m Blue-Eyed,” Jane says. “I am too,”one of the boys says. “It’s not funny.””It’s not fun.””It’s not pleasant.””This is a filthy nasty word called discrimination.””Were treating people a certain way because their different from the rest of us.””Is that fair?””No,”the kids say. “Nothing fair about it,”Jane says. “We didn’t say this was going to be a fair day did we.””No,”the kids say. “And it isn’t.””It’s a horrid day,”Jane says. The reason for the Brown-Eyes success with the card pack on the second day was they didn’t have to think about the green collars anymore. They did not have to think about their teacher looking at them as Inferior people or punishing them verbally for every mistake they made.
After the second year Jand did the exercise she sent Spelling, Math, and Reading Tests she gave her class to the Stanford University Psychology Department for a informal review and analysis. She sent them tests that she gave to the class two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise, and two weeks after the exercise. Jane said,”almost without exception their scores go up on the day they are on the top.””Down the day they are on the bottom and maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after the exercise.” The Stanford Psychology Department told Jane that the kids academic ability is being changed in a twenty-four hour period and that isn’t possible but it’s happening. Something very strange is happening to your third graders. Jane said what happened to the kids was the ones who had previously been quiet were more vocal and assertive during the exercise when they were in the Superior group. Kids who also had previously underperformed on their academic work started to do better when they were given special treatment by Jane. In her own words the exercise had shown them how really great they are and were then responding to what they now knew they were able to do. This happened consistently with her third graders throughout all of the time she put them through the exercise. Since 1968 when Jane did the exercise for the first time 300 students have gone through the exercise in Riceville, Iowa until the day she retired from teaching.
THE CLASS REUNION OF AUGUST 1984
At the class reunion of August 1984 Jane met with eleven of the students she had done the exercise with in the Eye of the Storm documentary. They put their chairs in a circle and discussed the experience fourteen years after they had originally done the exercise. Jane began the discussion by saying,”All right Raymond why?””I want to know why you were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids?””At the end of the day I thought the miserable little Nazi.” Everyone in the room laughs. “Really I just couldn’t stand you.””It felt tremendously evil,”Raymond said. “All of your inhibitions were gone and even though they were my friends or not any pent up hostilities or aggressions these kids have ever caused you, you could get them out.” As a kid after the second day he said,”I felt like a King like I ruled those Brown-Eyes.””Like I was better than them.””Happy.” Jane asks them how they, the Blue-Eyes, felt when they were the out-group. A woman with short brown hair says,”you want to talk about hating somebody woo-hoo it was there.””Hating me,” Jane says. “Yeah for what you were putting us through.””Nobody likes to be hated or looked down upon, teased or discriminated against and it just boggles up inside you.””You just get so mad.””Were you just angry or was it more than that,” Jane says? “I felt demoralized, humiliated,” Raymond said. “Is the learning worth the pain,” Jane asks them? Everybody says yes. “It made everything different than what it was.” “We was a lot better family even in our houses we was probably because uh, it was hard on you.””When you have your best friend one day and then he’s your enemy the next it brings it out real quick in you,” Roy Wilson says. “Some of the remarks were the things I wished I could have programmed into them.””They’re the things I would have wanted them to say.””Some of the things were just mind blowing,” Jane says in a off-camera commentary. “You know you hear these different people talking about uh, you know different people, how their different.””How they’d like to have them out of the country.””I wish they’d go back to Africa you know and stuff.”
“I wish I just had the collar in my pocket I could whip it out and put it on them and say wear this.””And put yourself in their place.””I wish they would go through what I went through,” a woman with feathered hair said. “We was at a softball game a couple of weekends ago and there was a Black there and I said Hey Burley and we hugged and everything .””And some people really looked at us like what are you doing with him.”
“You know you just get this burning feeling, sensation and you just want to let it out and put them through what we went through to find out their not any different,”a woman with short black hair said. “I would be by myself sometimes when I see some people together and I see how they act you know I think well that’s Black.””And then right in the next second I won’t even finish the thought I’m saying well I’ve seen white’s do it.””I’ve seen other people do it.””It’s not just the Blacks it’s everyone acts differently.””It’s just a different color is what hits you first and then later as I said I won’t even finish that thought before I remember back when I was like that and I remember not everyone acts the same way.””It’s just your way of thinking is the difference,” a woman with dark brown hair and glasses said. “Like when my grandparents or somebody and they start talking about old times and they say the Japs and all this and that and they start holding that against them.””I think how would you like to have been them?””Japanese-Americans get thrown into this camp just because they happen to be part Japanese.””You know I just said calm down and think about it but when they get older they’re se in their ways and they’re not going to change,”Sheila said. “When you get older,” Jane said? I’ll be set in my ways but their different for their ways.”
“I was absolutely enthralled,” Jane said off-camera. “Sandy Doleman’s statements that when my son comes home with the word Nigger and the other things he hears downtown I say to him listen that isn’t the way we judge people.” “You don’t judge people by how they look.””You judge them by what’s on their inside not their outside.”
“I’m glad that she’s teaching them not to hate because even though he does hear this from the other people if he goes home and thinks well mom and dad like the Black people.””I’m gonna like them too so I don’t think he’s gonna pick up nothing bad about it,” a guy with short dark hair said. “You chose you husband well,”Jane says. Everyone laughs. “He chose me,” the woman with feathered hair says laughingly. “You chose her well,” Jane says. “The kids will take and they’ll listen to a lot of other people too you know so their gonna end up kind of confused over it,” a guy with brown hair and mustache says. “But if she keeps on telling him is he going to be the kind of person you kids are or is he going to be the kind of person who will judge people by the color of their skin,” Jane said. “Well he’ll know somewhat right from wrong,” the guy with brown hair and mustache said. “He’ll know this but he’ll have the ideas.” “He won’t be judging them by their color but he won’t know what we know fully having been through it,” Sheila said. “He won’t learn the collar thing.””The prejudice for us,”the woman with brown hair and glasses said. “He won’t learn prejudice first handed,” Sheila said. “He won’t learn to be prejudiced from us,” the woman with brown hair and glasses said. “I mean they won’t learn to discriminate between people from us.””They might hear it from other people but never from us.””Okay what’s it like to be married to someone like that,” Jane said? Everyone laughs. “When I was gonna marry Sheila I know for my future that I was going to go into the military.””At first I thought is she going to be able to handle being with all the different nationalities.”
“An then I read the storm.””The book.””A Class Divided,” Jane said. “A Class Divided before we got married and before I joined the Army and I said she’s not gonna have any problems.””Should every child have the exercise or every teacher,” Jane says to everybody? “Everybody,” everyone says. “I think every school ought to implement something like this program into their early stages of education.” From this point Frontline: A Class Divided shifts to the Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York.
REACTIONS OF THE SOCIOLOGY STUDENTS AT GREENHAVEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY IN STORMVILLE, NEW YORK TO A SHOWING OF EYE OF THE STORM
The video now goes to a Maximum Security prison called Greenhaven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York where a Sociology class being taught by Professor Duane W. Smith. He has shown his students there the Eye of the Storm film for ten of the years that he has taught there. The narrator says this is the most unusual example of a setting in which the film has been used. The students in his class tend to be Blacks and Hispanics. They watch the film and then Professor Smith asks them,”Do you think the children by this process really learned the meaning of discrimination?””Most of the children before the film started they played and lived together in harmony and uh, certain actions coming from the teacher and seeing the teacher as a authoritarian figure and someone to respect they accepted the views that was given to them but I think at the end of the lesson they could clearly see that prejudices and other forms of discrimination are things people build within their minds that there not actual physical barriers that say yo you can’t cross the street,” a Black man with a beard said. “The one kid I could really agree with was at recess.””He was a Brown-Eyed kid.””He had this inner-turmoil against this feeling of being divided or prejudiced against where he would hit another kid that he’s known for so many year in the gut.””Whether he also stated that it didn’t help any so that automatically should be a lesson to every adult in the world.””Violence doesn’t help any and I hope this is a film my children get to see,” a Black man with glasses and a goatee said. The next and last part of the video is about the employees of the Iowa Department of Corrections going through Jane’s Eye Color Exercise and giving their reactions to what they learned from it.
JANE GIVE THE BLUES. THE BLUES. THE EMPLOYEES OF THE IOWA STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS AND THEIR REACTIONS TO THE EYE COLOR EXERCISE
The population of the state of Iowa is 98% White yet African-Americans compose 20% of the population in their prisons. It is because of this they hired Jane Elliot to come in and give their employees some sensitivity training by running them through her exercise. They were only told they were attending a day long workshop so they don’t know they are about to be ambushed in Jane’s Eye Color Exercise. One of the employees, David Stokesbury, noticed right away that the Brown-Eyes were the special group. They had their own restrooms and lots of places to sit down outside the workshop. The Blue-Eyes were given green collars to wear before the workshop began.
David said it was apparent before the workshop began that they were to be in the deprived group. The workshop was supposed to begin at 9 a.m. The Brown-Eyes were allowed to go in first while the Blue-Eyes had to stand outside waiting. There were plenty of stacked chairs outside that the Blue-Eyes could have used but David said he was too scared to take one down because he might get in trouble. The Blue-Eyes had to wait for twenty minutes before they could come in. They were talking while they waited and then a attendant came up and harassed them. He said you guys need to keep it down out here there are people in the workshop right now. I don’t know how many times I have to come out here and tell you but you need to keep it down. While the Blue-Eyes waited Jane prepared the Brown-Eyes on what to do when they came in. She told the Brown-Eyes the exercise would not work without their cooperation so they needed to help her by playing along when she discriminated against them. She then started to tell them negative things about the Blue-Eyes which were:
1.The Blue-Eyes aren’t allowed to smoke.
2.Blue-Eyed people aren’t allowed to sit in the empty chairs behind the Brown-Eyed section because they smell and you don’t know what kind of disease you might catch from them.
When the Blue-Eyes came in the women were told to put their purses in a corner at the back of the room and they all had to put their coats in a closet. This was done to set them up to be discriminated against by Jane as they were not told they would need some paper and a pen to take notes during the workshop. As they sat down in the Brown-Eyed section in the back rows Jane told them that it would be to their benefit if they got to meetings on time in the future. This was an obvious act of discrimination/ambush since they were on time and the reason they were late was because she didn’t let them in with the Blue-Eyes. Nobody in the Blue-Eyed group pointed this out to her possibly because she took them by surprise. Jane noticed one Blue-Eyed woman was chewing gum and she told her to spit it out and get rid of it. The woman said she doesn’t have anywhere to put it. She didn’t have anywhere to put it because Jane made sure her purse was taken away before everything began. The woman having no place to put the gum set it on the arm of her chair. Jane then says,”All right I want everybody to look at where she put her gum.””This is a typical Blue-Eyed thing to do you give them something nice and they just wreck it.” Jane then goes on to list the faults of Blue-Eyed people as being poor listeners and they don’t take anything seriously. They’re incapable of doing anything right and are always the class clown or poor students. She then goes on to say the first thing you have to do when you are teaching or working in a segregated situation is to teach the Blue-Eyes the Good Listening Skills. They are:
1.Good listeners have quiet feet, hands, and mouths.
2.Good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking.
3.Good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end.
4.Good listeners decide to learn something.
Everyone was supposed to be taking notes while Jane spoke. Roger, a Blue-Eyed man, doesn’t because he didn’t know he was supposed to bring a pen and paper. No one else had a pen or paper to loan him so that he could. He also didn’t have a chair to sit on so even if he had a pen and some paper it would have been difficult for him to take notes as he stood in the back of the room. There are empty chairs in the Brown-Eyed section but the Blues are not allowed to use them. Jane attacks him for this as an example of a lazy Blue-Eye who is choosing not to learn anything. She says he is playing a favorite Blue-Eyed game,”playing it cool nothing can bother me man I’m gonna ignore this whole thing.” Jane asks the Brown-Eyes what they think of the Blue-Eyes. “They are stubborn, inconsiderate, self-centered, and wish to control as much of their surroundings as possible.””I don’t understand why we have to have them here,” a Black man with glasses says. “We have them here because we have to have them here,” Jane says. “Oh we have to huh?””You have to.””This is one of the things you have to put up with.” Jane then goes on to say to the Brown-Eyes some of you have had trouble with Blue-Eyes either in the workplace or at home does any of you have an example of this? A Brown-Eyed woman with short brown hair named Sandy says she has two nephews. One is Brown-Eyed and one is Blue-Eyed. The Blue-Eyed one is real lazy and never cleans his room. He doesn’t seem to have any energy. The Brown-Eyed one is outgoing, a good athlete, and just a better all around kid so she hopes when she has kids they have Brown-Eyes. Jane says,”Well when the time comes you know what to do right.” Which is marry a Brown-Eyed man. In other words marry your own kind. Jane says to the Brown-Eyes if you are in a situation where Blue-Eyes are constantly refusing to obey the person in authority what do you know about them? A Brown-Eyed man in a Brown coat and glasses said it is a Blue-Eyed game for attention. It causes disrespect from the Brown-Eyed people for the Blue-Eyed people. This was being said about Roger because he could not get a pen and paper to take notes. Jane is still holding him up as an example of Blue-Eyes who can not learn or listen. The man says this is a typical trait of a Blue-Eyed person. Jane asks the Brown-Eyes what have you learned here about Blue-Eyed people that you didn’t know before? A Black man with a beard answers,”I find that I’m going to have to explain things a little more explicitly to a Blue-Eyed person than a Brown-Eyed person. Jane asks him,”how many times did I have to list the listening skills for Roger?” The man says,”well brother Roger is having a tough time back there today isn’t he?” Everyone laughs. “Six or Seven times.”
Jane then had everyone take a written test. When the tests are collected three women did not put their full names on their tests. She says to the women,”You know what you do to the image of Blues is unfortunate.””What you three people do to the image of women with your behavior really makes me angry.””The fact that you do this kind of thing and this kind of sloppy work reflects badly on women.””I resent that doubly.” A woman named Karen says,”Uh, maam I really appreciate it if you would call us by name when you say you three people we don’t know who your speaking to it could be anyone here.””My dear if you wanted me to call you by name you’d have put your name on your paper,” Jane said while pointing her pen at her. It’s on my,”Karen says while showing her name tag to her. “It was to be on your paper,” Jane says. “That’s right,” Karen says. “All right now how can one call you by your name if you don’t care enough about your name to put it on your paper don’t expect me to worry about it.””You don’t know how to read,” Karen says?
“Don’t expect me to worry about it if you don’t put it on your paper.””Your being totally unrealistic.” “I don’t remember saying my name was important to me I remember saying I’d like to know who your speaking to when you say you three,” Karen said. “Then what should you do,” Jane said. “Ask you to use my name which I did.””And where should your name have been,” Jane said. “Right where it is,” Karen said while showing her, her name tag again. “On your paper,” Jane said? “And on my birth-certificate,” Karen said. “Is it on your paper,” Jane said? “No maam,” Karen said.
“Where did you get a birth-certificate,” Jane asked? “Out of a slot-machine same as you lady,” Karen says. Everybody laughs. “I think your probably right about your own,” Jane shoots back. “At least I know who my parents are maam,” Karen says.
Jane then says to a Brown-Eyed Asian man,”is she being rude?” He says,”yes.”
“She being inconsiderate?” He says,”very.””She being uncooperative?” He says,”very.”
“She being insulting?” He says,”yes.””Are all those the things that we’ve accused Blue-Eyed people of being?” He says,”yes.””Is she proving that were right?””Yes,”he says. Jane puts her hands palms out as if to say I just proved my point. She then asks the audience,”does anyone have any comments to make at this point?””Do you feel that there are important Blue-Eyed people,”a man with short hair says? “There are exceptions to every rule,” Jane says. “What are those exceptions,” the man says? “There are a few important Blue-Eyed people.””Very few,”the man says. “Do you think that you are one of them,” a woman named Janine says? “No,” Jane says. “Why are you up there then,” the man says. “I’m Blue-Eyed the difference between you and me is I have a Brown-Eyed husband and Brown-Eyed offspring and I’ve learned how to behave in a Brown-Eyed society and when you can act Brown enough then you too can be where I am,” Jane says. “I wouldn’t want to be where you are,” Karen says. “Are you certain,” Jane says?
“Absolutely positive,” Karen says. “You like where you are,” Jane says? “I love where I am,” Karen says. “You like it so much that you don’t even identify yourself on your paper,” Jane says? “I don’t need to lady,” Karen says. “Her using the term lady where I’m concerned what do you think she’s trying to do?””Is it ignorance or deliberately insulting,” Jane says to a Brown-Eyed woman in a red sweater? “I would say it was deliberately insulting,” the woman says giving her a big friendly smile. “If it’s ignorance she need to be taught that to many of us the word lady is a pejorative (having or indicating a disparaging meaning),” Jane says. “I don’t appreciate it.””It is um it’s a put-down and it’s used to keep women in their place.””I will call you by your correct name after this I won’t be kind,” Karen says.
“That was kindness on your part.””Yes,” Karen says. “Then you are a true,” Jane says before Karen interrupts her. “Calling someone a lady is a kindness.””Then your problem is ignorance.””You can call me lady anytime you like,”Karen says. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” Jane says. “I know you wouldn’t,” Karen says. “I, I think that and that’s part of the problem is a total lack of awareness at what sexism amounts to and how much you contribute to the sexism that keeps you where you are,” Jane says. Karen pouts her lower lip and nods her head in sarcastic mock agreement until Jane is finished talking. “I like where I am lady,” Karen says pointing her pen at Jane. Everyone laughs. “I did it again didn’t I,” Karen says smiling. Jane smiles too and looks over at David Stokesbury who now has his hand raised and says,”yes.” “I’m getting kind of fed up with this whole bunch of garbage,” David says. “Why,” Jane says? “Brown-Eyed peoples are no different than we are I hate to tell them that they have these false delusions and such.”
“Are they being disruptive,” Jane asks him? “No you trained them very well uh I think that’s what they did with the Storm troopers in Germany also.””You guys do a real good job sitting up there.””Do you think what’s happening here today feels like what it would have felt in Nazi Germany,” Jane asks him? “Yes,” David says. “Where do you think you are in that then?””Where do I think I am,” David asks her? “Who are you?””If we’re in Nazi Germany who are you?””Uh the Jews,”David answers her. Jane then extends her palms out over the podium and dips her head a little bit as if to say now do you get it. After that the group breaks up for lunch and comes back to talk about what they learned from the exercise.
When they come back Jane looks out from behind her podium and asks Roger,”did you learn anything this morning?””I think I learned from the experience feeling like I was in a glass cage and I was powerless.”””There was a sense of hopelessness uh I was angry I wanted to speak up and yet at times I knew if I spoke up I would be back in a powerless situation.””I would be attacked uh a sense of hopelessness,”Roger said. “Had you experienced that before,” Jane said? “I realized this morning that there were very few times in my life that I have been discriminated against very few,”Roger said. “And you were this uncomfortable in a hour and a half,” Jane said.
“I was amazed at how uncomfortable I was in the first fifteen minutes.””Can you empathize at all then with Blacks, minority group members in this country,” Jane said? “I’m hoping better than before.””We tried to argue with you, you would use just the mere argument as reason for us being lesser than the Brown-Eyed folks.””You know you couldn’t win,” David Stokesbury said. “But don’t we do that every day,” Jane said. “I think some do yeah but I would hope that I never get so unreasonable I’d, you know the statements you were making were groundless and such and yet we couldn’t argue with them because if we argued then we were argumentative and you know not listening and getting out of our place and all that stuff and that was frustrating to me and then frustrating to me was the other little green tags were sitting on their hands.””My group here was I didn’t think boisterous enough in our opposition to the whole thing,” David said.
“Why didn’t you people support one another?””Why didn’t the Blue-Eyed people?””The Blue-Eyed people just sat there and let’s face it you covered your ass’s,” Jane said. “Why did you just sit there?’”I think symptomatic of the problem as a whole we see that in society in general.”’We see a few people sitting back waiting to see what they’re going to do,”a man with white hair said. “Okay as long as I was picking on him I was leaving you alone right,” Jane said. “Right,” the man with white hair said. “I’d say a lot of people accept it and let a few people do their fighting for them and they stand back and if this person is going to win then they’ll get on this side but if that person is not gonna win they’ll stay back over here you know that’s just how it works,” Evelyn Riley said. “If you were in a real situation where you had to do something about racism would you stand up and be counted,” Jane said? “What I would do I don’t know it would depend on the exigencies (a situation that demands immediate attention),” the man with white hair said. “But you would do something,” Jane said? “I would have to do something I couldn’t go home and face my kids tonight if I didn’t, the man with white hair said. “How did you Brown-Eyed people feel while this was going on,” Jane said? A sense of relief that I wasn’t a Blue-Eyed person,” a man with a beard and glasses said.
“Sense of relief that you had the right colored eyes absolutely,” Jane said. “I really understood at least I felt I understood what it was like to be in the minority,” a man with short hair said. “Why were you angry,” Jane says to Karen? “First of all because it was unreasonable, secondly because I felt discriminated against, thirdly I think that all of us everyone in this room has dealt with discrimination on both sides.””You don’t have to be Black or Jewish or Mexican or anything else to have felt discrimination in your life and as you become an adult you learn to deal with those feelings within yourself.””You learn to handle those and when you feel yourself uh in a situation that you can’t get out of which we couldn’t.””We were a captive audience and it was not a normal situation because normally you aren’t badgered,” Karen said. “What if you had to spend the rest of your life this way,” Jane said? “I don’t know how to answer that,” Karen sighs. “You don’t wake up every morning knowing that your different,” a woman with long black hair says. “You wake up as a White woman who is going to her job at 8 o’clock or whatever where a black person is gonna wake up knowing from the minute they get up out of the bed and look in the mirror that their Black and they have to deal with the problems they had to deal with ever since they were young and realize that I am different and I have to deal with life differently.””Things are differently for me and I don’t think you can really say that you have felt maybe you have felt some sort of discrimination but you haven’t felt what it is like for a Black woman to go through the daily experiences of arguing and saying listen to me my point of view is good.””You know what I have to offer is good and no one wants to listen because White is right that’s the way things are.” This is the point at which the footage of the exercise ends.
“IF WE REALLY ACTED THAT WAY.” CLOSING COMMENTS BY JANE AT THE END OF THE VIDEO.
“I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime no I don’t want to see it used more widely I want to see the necessity for it wiped out and I think if Educators were determined that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise but I want to see something used.””I’d like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not all students unless, unless it’s done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way.””I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily and I would never suggest that everybody should use it.””I think you could have training classes for teachers bring them in put them through the thing.””Explain what happened do the debriefing and then practice doing this until teachers.””Until a group of teachers were able to do it on their own and I, teachers are not disabled learners they could learn to do this.””Obviously if I can do it most anyone can do it.””It doesn’t take a super-teacher to do this exercise.”
“After you do this exercise when the debriefing starts.””When the pain is over and your all back together and your all one again you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we preach.””If we really acted that way you could feel as good about one another as those kids feel about one another after this exercise is over.””You create instant cousins.””I thought maybe that lasted just while they were in my classroom because of my superior influence but indeed these kids still feel that way about one another.””They said yesterday over and over the remark was made were kind of like a family now.””They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way and they refuse to hurt one another that way again.””And they said were kind of like a family now and indeed we were.” This is the point at which Frontline A Class Divided ends.
THE PRICE SHE PAID
After the first time Jane did the exercise in 1968 she had her students write an essay on what they learned from the exercise. She showed the essays to her mother who in turn shared them with a local newspaper called the Riceville Recorder. The Associated Press picked up the story and a month later Johnny Carson called her to invite her to be on the Tonight Show. Jane made her appearance on the Tonight Show and then went home. She came home to a frosty reception from her fellow teachers and the townspeople. For whatever reason they did not like the attention she had brought to their town. People wrote her letters saying how dare she do this to White children. Black children are used to such abuse but White ones are not. Over the years Jane maintains 80% of the people in Riceville supported her doing the exercise while 20% did not. The 20% though were the most vocal calling and writing her death threats while that other 80% remained quiet. Three of her four children also soon came under attack. Her daughter Mary, twelve years old at the time, came home crying from school because some of her sixth grade classmates had surrounded her and said Jane would soon be having sex with Black men. This is a favorite tactic of bigots. When someone says they sympathize with an oppressed group they must be one of them they say or want to have sex with them. Her son Brian was beaten up at school by a group of boys and her oldest daughter Sarah came out of a restroom stall one day to see the word Nigger Lover written on the mirror in red-lipstick.
In the mid-1970s Jane went to Uniontown, Pennsylvania at the request of a committee there and did the exercise with several hundred teachers. The teachers got so angry afterwards they called the Superintendent and said if you don’t get her out of here were going to shoot her. Three carloads of Black people smuggled her out of town after midnight. The next morning Jane very courageously decided she would never again allow the threats of racists stop her from speaking or running the exercise. She said she has had one White male hit her during the exercise and another pull a knife on her. At a college in Texas a man dressed in combat fatigues ran up to the podium she was speaking at and threatened to someday kill her. “I’ve had lot’s of that kind of stuff,” Jane said. “I’m fully aware that it goes with the territory.””But other people need to realize that this ugliness is still going on and that it’s still dangerous to stand up and be counted.”
THE POSITIVE RESULTS JANE HAS ACCOMPLISHED WITH HER LIFE AND CAREER.
The most significant thing to remember about Jane is that on the morning after Martin Luther King died she had very little money or power. All she had was a third grade classroom but she used it to try and do her part to make a difference. While Jane had some negative experience from her work she has also gotten a lot of positive feedback from her endeavors. After a visit to her old Elementary school in 2003 with writer Stephen G. Bloom, during which she was not allowed to see her old classroom, feeling shunned Jane ran into a former student. Her former student told her she never forgot the exercise and it changed her life for the better. She asked Jane if she could please do the exercise on her grandchildren. Jane was so touched by her remark that tears formed at the corners of her eyes. Few if any of her former students have said that they regretted going through the exercise with Jane or resent her today for putting them through it. And while some feel third grade is too young for a child to go through the exercise very few said they would not want their kids to go through it. When teaching it abroad Jane has said she has also had similar positive experiences. One in particular happened in Germany. A woman from the former East Germany said she did not want to do the exercise because she did not feel it was necessary. Jane put it to a group vote. The group voted to do the exercise. When it was over the woman with tears in her eyes said she was so glad that they did the exercise. She would not have learned as much from the lecture. The reason Germans would need the exercise is because like the United States
Western Europe is becoming increasingly Multi-Cultural due to the recent influxes of immigration from Non-White countries. In Glasgow, Scotland a Black woman came up to Jane after a lecture and said,”you have no idea, you are the first White person ever in my life who has validated what I have said all my life and what I have experienced.””Thank you.” Jane said,”you don’t have to thank me.””Everything I know about this topic I’ve learned from people like you.””It’s I who should be thanking you.” “Oh, but you don’t understand.””These are things that we have been saying for years.””Nobody would tell us that they believed us or that they felt the way we do.””You validated me today.”
THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JANE ELLIOT SINCE EYE OF THE STORM
Jane was born near Riceville, Iowa in 1933. She is of Irish-American descent. She has four children. She taught kids in the third grade from 1968-1977 and then moved up to teach seventh and eighth graders from 1977-1985. In 1985 she requested a leave of absence to go and do the exercise with corporations and government agencies. She was denied a leave of absence so she retired from teaching and went on the road to teach the exercise and give lectures on discrimination. Her first television appearance was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Since then she has been on 60 Minutes and on the Oprah Winfrey Show five times. When not on the road she spends her time at her home in Osage, Iowa or Riverside, California. Frontline A Class Divided still remains the most requested video on PBS.
WEBSITES
In addition to the Frontline A Class Divided documentary there is a Teacher’s Guide website. It’s address is www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided. On the website you can find additional readings and links, tapes and transcripts, and watch the video online. In the teacher’s guide there is: a note to teachers, pre-viewing preparation, viewing the documentary instructions, post-viewing lesson plans, internet and other resources, and a student assignment sheet.
If you would like to visit Jane’s official website it is www.janeelliot.com. At the website you can see a synopsis of her lectures, workshop, and learning materials. You can also buy her five videos there. They are: The Stolen Eye, The Angry Eye, Blue-Eyed, and A Class Divided. You can also get A Class Divided at www.pbs.org. If you would like to contact Jane and invite her up to give a lecture or run the exercise on you her phone number and e-mail address are on her website. She usually charges a fee for this.
WORKS CITED
Frontline A Class Divided, prod. William Peters, one hour, PBS Video 1999, videocassette.
Stephen G. Bloom, Lesson of a Lifetime,”Smithsonian Magazine, September 2005
An Unfinished Crusade An Interview with Jane Elliot,”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/crusade.html
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