Jane Elliott
Encyclopedia
Jane Elliott is an American
teacher
and anti-racism
activist. She created the famous “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” exercise, first done with grade school children in the 1960s, and which later became the basis for her career in diversity training
.
was a result of Martin Luther King’s
assassination. According to one biographer, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Jane Elliott turned on her television to find out about the assassination. One scene she says that she remembers vividly is that of a (white) reporter, with the microphone pointed toward a local black leader asking “When our leader (John F. Kennedy
) was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?” It was supposedly there, in her living room, that she decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans
with the lesson done about King for February’s Hero of the Month. To tie the two, she would use the saying “Oh Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.”
The following day she had a class discussion about it and about racism in general. But she states “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” She states her lesson plan for that day was to learn the Sioux
prayer about not judging someone without walking in his/her moccasins and “I treated them as we treat Hispanic
s, Chicano
s, Latino
s, Blacks, Asia
ns, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities.”
The original idea for the exercise came from the novel Mila 18
by Leon Uris
, published in 1961, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
during World War II
. One of the ways they decided who went into the gas chamber, according to the novel and history, was eye color.
Because most of her 8-year-old students had, like Jane, been born and were being raised in a small town in Iowa and had seen black people only on television, she felt that simply talking about racism would not allow her all-white class to fully comprehend racism's meaning and effects.
On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific
explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin
responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King
and write compositions about the experience.
.
Because of the AP story, Elliott was invited to appear on Johnny Carson
’s Tonight Show. After her telling of the exercise in a short interview segment, audience reaction to her was instant as hundreds of calls came into the show’s switchboard, most of the reaction being negative. An often-quoted letter states “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children.”
Elliott has said that the exercise and the publicity that it was getting did not make her popular with some of the local citizens. When Elliott walked into the teacher’s lounge the day after being on the Johnny Carson show, several teachers walked out. Elliott claims that even her own children were taunted or assaulted by other students.
However, not all the reaction was negative. The mail that Elliott received after each television appearance was overwhelmingly positive, particularly from adult persons of color and educators. Most of the time that she remained in the Riceville school system, she had the support of her superiors and they gave her unpaid leave to pursue outside activities which were related to the exercise and its effects. As news of her exercise spread, she appeared on more television shows, and started to repeat the exercise in professional training days for adults. On December 15, 1970, Elliott provided the experience for educators, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and civic leaders at a White House Conference on Children and Youth
, staging it for adults, but with the same reactions as those exhibited by her students, though much more violent.
In 1971, the American Broadcasting Company
(ABC) broadcast a documentary about her called “The Eye of the Storm” and made her more nationally known. After that, two books, “A Class Divided” and “A Class Divided: Then and Now” by William Peters
were written about her and the exercise. “A Class Divided” was turned into a PBS Frontline documentary in 1985, and included a reunion of the schoolchildren featured in “The Eye of the Storm”. “Frontline: A Class Divided” is the most requested video on PBS’s
website. A televised edition of the exercise was shown in the United Kingdom
on 29 October 2009 on Channel 4
entitled The Event: How Racist Are You?. This documentary was intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create an awareness to the effects of racist behaviors by using UK citizens. In fact, actors who had been seen previously on UK programming and commercials were allowed to participate without Elliott's knowledge, thereby discrediting the entire presentation.
Among her honors was being featured by Peter Jennings
on ABC as “Person of the Week” and textbook editor McGraw-Hill
lists her on a timeline of notable educators along with Confucius
, Plato
, Booker T. Washington
and Maria Montessori
. She has been invited to speak at 350 colleges and universities as well as appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show
five times.
Elliott considers her greatest honor to be having Kenneth Clark write the foreword to the book "A Class Divided Then and Now" by William Peters in which he states, "...Jane Elliott's contribution demonstrates that it is possible to educate and produce a class of human beings united by understanding, acceptance, and empathy."
. She has done such training for corporations like General Electric
, Exxon
, AT&T
, and IBM
, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education and US Postal Service.
As Elliott began to do workshops and other training based on her exercise to organizations outside of her school system, the Riceville school system granted her unpaid leave to do this. However, the increasing demands to be away from the classroom eventually caused problems with her public school teaching career. Elliott left teaching in the mid 1980s to devote herself full time to corporate training. Her standard fee since then has been at least $6,000 per day for companies and governmental institutions.
The exercise that Elliott developed for her classroom was redeveloped for the corporate world. The exercise was promoted positively as a way to promote teamwork, profits and “winning together”. On the negative side, it was claimed that not doing such diversity training could make these same companies open to bad publicity, boycotts and lawsuits.
Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of non-Caucasians
in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism
brought about by pressure from civil rights
groups during the same two decades.
These policies and rulings primarily dealt with “hostile work environments" such as; the Supreme Court of the United States
’s 1986 ruling in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson
where employers were accused of tolerating between groups of employees; and the notion of “disparate impact” (established in the 1970s by Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
) that could hold a company liable for practices that resulted in unequal outcomes even if it was not the company’s intention. Other lawsuits of these two types had been realized against companies like Texaco
, CocaCola, Denny's
, Chevy Chase Bank
, Sodexho
and Abercrombie & Fitch
. In most of these cases, the judgment went against these companies resulting in the payment of compensation and the implementation of some kind of monitored diversity plan. Elliott herself offered Denny’s as an example of how racism leads to costs via lawsuits. She claimed that Denny’s had to pay $46 million USD for one suit but still had an incident later where a group of black children were not waited on, and so predicted another suit for the restaurant chain.
Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity. Elliott said, “If you can’t think of any other reason for getting rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver.” In fact, by the 1980s many corporations had started to accept much of what diversity training proposed to do, adopting role-playing exercises and terms such as “inclusion”, “mutual learning”, “and “winning together”. By 1994, there were 5,000 diversity trainers in the United States. In 2004, Coca Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell asked a court to extend federal supervision of its diversity policy citing such oversight as a valuable resource. The rationale given for this acceptance is that it not only helps with complying with US federal law but helps profits by reducing employee turnover and increasing market reach.
Diversity training based on Elliott’s methods has been mandated by colleges and universities such as Wake Forest University
and Johns Hopkins University
. Often these are required after incidents such as the Halloween
party invitations done by the Sigma Chi
fraternity chapter at Johns Hopkins which were accused of being racially offensive.
Elliott-inspired diversity training has been realized outside the United States as well. Diversity training was little-known in the United Kingdom
at the beginning of the 1990s; however when The Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 passed in the United Kingdom
, it listed 100 diversity training firms in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
, 70% of firms have diversity policies in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these courses are designed to have a “lighter touch” than Elliott’s approach, but those based solidly on Elliott’s model are also promoted. Elliott has personally held workshops in Australia
, focusing on racial issues brought up by Pauline Hanson
and the lack of acknowledgment of contributions made by aborigines in that country. Jane Elliott sells videos and other materials to be used by diversity trainers on her website.
According to supporters of Elliott’s approach, the goal is to reach people’s sense of empathy and morality. It seeks to address a sense of apathy that many people have because they do not think the problem affects them or that they do not believe that they act in a racist manner. Elliott says racism is not inherent: “You are not born a racist. You have to carefully be taught to be one.” And while Jane Elliott created the exercise as a response to racial discrimination, her approach is equally touted to point out sexism
, ageism
and homophobia
as well.
However, it is the manner in which these training sessions are conducted and Elliott’s role as a trainer that has drawn criticism. First, she usually puts the “brown-eyed” participants in the superior position. If the group attending the session is of various races, the ones experiencing discrimination are most likely to be white.
The corporate version of “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” is still based on demeaning a chosen group of people and then letting the temporarily favored group taunt them, much the way the brown-eyed children of the original exercise did, and, according to people of color the way minority group members are treated in this country on a daily basis. Like in the original exercise, she does not explicitly tell participants to mock others but uses choice of language and tone, removal of basic rights (such as being allowed to speak without permission) and a constant changing of the rules to discomfort the blue-eyed participants - a deliberate reversal of what happens in society at large. At the same time she uses positive language, praise and encouragement to the brown-eyed people. One way she does this is with the use of an alternative IQ test called the “Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test
” which asks questions about the black experience of the 1950s and 1960s. “… which presumes that most whites would not be able to answer, thus mimicking the experience that blacks supposedly have with more conventional IQ tests."
At seminars given at U.S. federal agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA), white males were verbally abused by black peers and then forced to walk a gauntlet to be touched by female workers. This, however, is totally irrelevant to Elliott's Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed Exercise, and Elliott is opposed to its being referenced in this article. Jane herself states “When we have multicultural diversity training, one of the first things they have is a dinner where they serve foods from all different lands. Except white. We don’t study white culture ‘cause that’s the right culture’. We already know white culture. We don’t call it white culture, we call it reality.”
Another criticism of such training programs is that they do not permit genuine debate or discussion about the issues to be addressed, even though extensive discussion is encouraged directly following Elliott's exercise, sometimes months after the completion of the exercise, and, in the classroom for the rest of the year.
She has also been accused of not recognizing the social and political changes that have occurred since the era in which she originally developed the exercise. Alan Charles Kors
, a conservative professor of history at University of Pennsylvania
noted for his defense of students accused of shouting racial slurs in the water buffalo incident
of 1993, writes that Elliott’s exercise teaches “blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites,” adding that “in her view, nothing has changed in American [sic] since the collapse of Reconstruction.”(p. 19)
However, Elliott seems to feel that such an approach is still necessary. She is quoted as saying “I’ve reached a point now where I will no longer tolerate the intolerable. I’m a ball of barbed-wire and I know it.” “After 30 years of dealing with this subject of racism, I am no longer a sweet, gentle person. I want it stopped.” She has also expressed frustration at the idea that she still needs to do this exercise, “It shouldn’t be necessary in 2008,” she says, to “…say things that are difficult for people to hear. I’m not kind about it. But neither are the racists.”
More than 450 children went through her experiment from 1968 to 1984 and many say that she is “a hero, a teacher extraordinaire, whose simple experiment, which lasted just two days, forever changed their lives.” ( p9) Almost all these students say that they remember the exercise very vividly and that it made them think, and try to be different. As to whether they want their own children or students to experience it, results are mixed. Special education teacher Jay McGovern, who was one of Elliott’s grade school students, says that she was an outstanding teacher but he feels uncertain about what he experienced in her exercise. “The way she did it, she put people down… Today, … You don’t ridicule or berate people to try to make your point. Back in the '60s, there wasn’t that body of research.” (p18) However another student, Dale McCarthy, who went through the exercise in 1969, recalls that while he found the experience “nearly impossible to endure” he realized the benefit the first time he met a black man and shook his hand. He also states that one of his brothers-in-law is black and there is no problem, but adds that if his own daughter had to do that exercise, he would complain to the school. (p20-21)
Academic research into Elliott’s experiment is inconclusive about whether it reduces long-term prejudice or if the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits. She has been accused of scaring people, breaking the school rules, humiliating children, being domineering, angry and brainwashing. Two professors of education in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, claim unhesistantly that what Elliott did was unethical, calling the experiment psychologically and emotionally damaging. They also stated ethical concerns connected to the fact that the children were not told of the purpose of the exercise beforehand. Long term results of the diversity training for adults are also unknown. In some courses, participants can wind up feeling frustrated about “their inability to change” and instead begin to feel anger against the very groups they are supposed to be more sensitive to. It can also lead to anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or being offended. However, three years after Elliott's original exercise, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa conducted an attitudinal survey of the third- to sixth-grade students in the Riceville Community School and in the third- to sixth-grade students in a comparable community to measure their attitudes concerning racism. When the results were compiled, not only were Elliott's former students less racist in their responses as measured by this survey, than were their fellow students, but ALL the students in the third- to sixth-grades in the Riceville school were less racist than the students in the comparable community. The associate professor concluded that not only were Elliott's students attitudes positively changed by the exercise, but their attitudes were ameliorating the attitudes of their peers.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
teacher
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
and anti-racism
Anti-racism
Anti-racism includes beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism. In general, anti-racism is intended to promote an egalitarian society in which people do not face discrimination on the basis of their race, however defined...
activist. She created the famous “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” exercise, first done with grade school children in the 1960s, and which later became the basis for her career in diversity training
Diversity training
Diversity training is training for the purpose of increasing participants' cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills, which is based on the assumption that the training will benefit an organization by protecting against civil rights violations, increasing the inclusion of different identity groups,...
.
Origin of the idea
While there are variations of the story, the exercise Elliott developed for her third grade class in Riceville, IowaIowa
Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...
was a result of Martin Luther King’s
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
assassination. According to one biographer, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Jane Elliott turned on her television to find out about the assassination. One scene she says that she remembers vividly is that of a (white) reporter, with the microphone pointed toward a local black leader asking “When our leader (John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
) was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?” It was supposedly there, in her living room, that she decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
with the lesson done about King for February’s Hero of the Month. To tie the two, she would use the saying “Oh Great Spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.”
The following day she had a class discussion about it and about racism in general. But she states “And I could see that they weren’t internalizing a thing. They were doing what white people do. When white people sit down to discuss racism what they are experiencing is shared ignorance.” She states her lesson plan for that day was to learn the Sioux
Sioux
The Sioux are Native American and First Nations people in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many language dialects...
prayer about not judging someone without walking in his/her moccasins and “I treated them as we treat Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
s, Chicano
Chicano
The terms "Chicano" and "Chicana" are used in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. However, those terms have a wide range of meanings in various parts of the world. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement, mainly among Mexican Americans, especially in the movement's...
s, Latino
Latino
The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...
s, Blacks, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
ns, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities.”
The original idea for the exercise came from the novel Mila 18
Mila 18
Mila 18 is a novel by Leon Uris set in German-occupied Warsaw, Poland before and during World War II. Leon Uris's work, based on real events, covers the Nazi occupation of Poland and the atrocities of systematically dehumanising and eliminating the Jewish People of Poland...
by Leon Uris
Leon Uris
Leon Marcus Uris was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976.-Life:...
, published in 1961, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp....
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. One of the ways they decided who went into the gas chamber, according to the novel and history, was eye color.
Because most of her 8-year-old students had, like Jane, been born and were being raised in a small town in Iowa and had seen black people only on television, she felt that simply talking about racism would not allow her all-white class to fully comprehend racism's meaning and effects.
The exercise
Steven Armstrong was the first child to arrive in Elliott’s classroom on that day, asking why "that King" (referring to Martin Luther King Jr.) was murdered the day before. After the rest of the class arrived, Elliott asked them what the children knew about blacks. The children responded with various racial stereotypes such as ignorance, unemployment, and common labels to those of Native Americans or Blacks . She then asked these children if they would like to try an exercise to feel what it was like to be treated the way a colored person is treated in America, mentioning that it would be interesting if there was segregation based on eye color instead of skin color. The children enthusiastically agreed to try the exercise.On that day, she designated the blue-eyed children as the superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method of easily identifying the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit the back rows. The blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyes and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain, and often chastised the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the experiment's rules or made mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by singling out students, and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to emphasize. Elliott observed that the students' reaction to the discrimination exercise showed immediate changes in their personalities and interaction with each other as early as the first 15 minutes.
At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott used pseudo-scientific
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
explanations for her actions by stating that the melanin
Melanin
Melanin is a pigment that is ubiquitous in nature, being found in most organisms . In animals melanin pigments are derivatives of the amino acid tyrosine. The most common form of biological melanin is eumelanin, a brown-black polymer of dihydroxyindole carboxylic acids, and their reduced forms...
responsible for making blue-eyed children also was linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed “superior” became arrogant, bossy and otherwise unpleasant to their “inferior” classmates. Their grades also improved, doing mathematical and reading tasks that seemed outside their ability before. The “inferior” classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children’s academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The following day, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars and the children cried and hugged one another. To reflect on the experience, she had the children write letters to Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King helped lead the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.Mrs...
and write compositions about the experience.
Controversy surrounding the exercise
According to Elliott, the first reaction to her exercise (Elliott prefers not to refer it as an "experiment") was in the teachers’ lounge at lunchtime the day she did the exercise for the first time. When Elliott explained what she was doing in her class and why and how a number of shy and slow blue-eyed children were benefiting at the expense of the “brown-eyes", there was disbelief and confusion. One teacher responded that, "I thought it was about time somebody shot that son-of-a-bitch." Elliott was shocked and dismayed. Later, the compositions that the children wrote about the experience were printed in the Riceville Recorder on page 4 on April 18, 1968 under the headline “How Discrimination Feels”. This story was picked up by the Associated PressAssociated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
.
Because of the AP story, Elliott was invited to appear on Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson
John William "Johnny" Carson was an American television host and comedian, known as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for 30 years . Carson received six Emmy Awards including the Governor Award and a 1985 Peabody Award; he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987...
’s Tonight Show. After her telling of the exercise in a short interview segment, audience reaction to her was instant as hundreds of calls came into the show’s switchboard, most of the reaction being negative. An often-quoted letter states “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children.”
Elliott has said that the exercise and the publicity that it was getting did not make her popular with some of the local citizens. When Elliott walked into the teacher’s lounge the day after being on the Johnny Carson show, several teachers walked out. Elliott claims that even her own children were taunted or assaulted by other students.
However, not all the reaction was negative. The mail that Elliott received after each television appearance was overwhelmingly positive, particularly from adult persons of color and educators. Most of the time that she remained in the Riceville school system, she had the support of her superiors and they gave her unpaid leave to pursue outside activities which were related to the exercise and its effects. As news of her exercise spread, she appeared on more television shows, and started to repeat the exercise in professional training days for adults. On December 15, 1970, Elliott provided the experience for educators, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and civic leaders at a White House Conference on Children and Youth
White House Conference on Children and Youth
The White House Conference on Children and Youth was a series of meetings hosted over 70 years by the President of the United States of America, and the first White House conference ever held. Under the leadership of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D....
, staging it for adults, but with the same reactions as those exhibited by her students, though much more violent.
In 1971, the American Broadcasting Company
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
(ABC) broadcast a documentary about her called “The Eye of the Storm” and made her more nationally known. After that, two books, “A Class Divided” and “A Class Divided: Then and Now” by William Peters
William Peters (journalist)
William Ernest Peters Jr. was an award-winning American journalist and documentary filmmaker who frequently covered race relations in the United States....
were written about her and the exercise. “A Class Divided” was turned into a PBS Frontline documentary in 1985, and included a reunion of the schoolchildren featured in “The Eye of the Storm”. “Frontline: A Class Divided” is the most requested video on PBS’s
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
website. A televised edition of the exercise was shown in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
on 29 October 2009 on Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
entitled The Event: How Racist Are You?. This documentary was intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create an awareness to the effects of racist behaviors by using UK citizens. In fact, actors who had been seen previously on UK programming and commercials were allowed to participate without Elliott's knowledge, thereby discrediting the entire presentation.
Among her honors was being featured by Peter Jennings
Peter Jennings
Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM was a Canadian American journalist and news anchor. He was the sole anchor of ABC's World News Tonight from 1983 until his death in 2005 of complications from lung cancer...
on ABC as “Person of the Week” and textbook editor McGraw-Hill
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...
lists her on a timeline of notable educators along with Confucius
Confucius
Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....
, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
and Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...
. She has been invited to speak at 350 colleges and universities as well as appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show
The Oprah Winfrey Show is an American syndicated talk show hosted and produced by its namesake Oprah Winfrey. It ran nationally for 25 seasons beginning in 1986, before concluding in 2011. It is the highest-rated talk show in American television history....
five times.
Elliott considers her greatest honor to be having Kenneth Clark write the foreword to the book "A Class Divided Then and Now" by William Peters in which he states, "...Jane Elliott's contribution demonstrates that it is possible to educate and produce a class of human beings united by understanding, acceptance, and empathy."
Origin of workplace diversity training
Jane Elliott is considered to be the “foremother” of diversity training, with the blue-eyed/brown-eyed scenario as the basis of much of what is called diversity trainingDiversity training
Diversity training is training for the purpose of increasing participants' cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills, which is based on the assumption that the training will benefit an organization by protecting against civil rights violations, increasing the inclusion of different identity groups,...
. She has done such training for corporations like General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
, Exxon
Exxon
Exxon is a chain of gas stations as well as a brand of motor fuel and related products by ExxonMobil. From 1972 to 1999, Exxon was the corporate name of the company previously known as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey or Jersey Standard....
, AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
, and IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education and US Postal Service.
As Elliott began to do workshops and other training based on her exercise to organizations outside of her school system, the Riceville school system granted her unpaid leave to do this. However, the increasing demands to be away from the classroom eventually caused problems with her public school teaching career. Elliott left teaching in the mid 1980s to devote herself full time to corporate training. Her standard fee since then has been at least $6,000 per day for companies and governmental institutions.
The exercise that Elliott developed for her classroom was redeveloped for the corporate world. The exercise was promoted positively as a way to promote teamwork, profits and “winning together”. On the negative side, it was claimed that not doing such diversity training could make these same companies open to bad publicity, boycotts and lawsuits.
Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of non-Caucasians
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
brought about by pressure from civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
groups during the same two decades.
These policies and rulings primarily dealt with “hostile work environments" such as; the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
’s 1986 ruling in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson
Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson
Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 , marked the United States Supreme Court's recognition of certain forms of sexual harassment as a violation of Civil Rights Act of 1964 Title VII, and established the standards for analyzing whether conduct was unlawful and when an employer would be...
where employers were accused of tolerating between groups of employees; and the notion of “disparate impact” (established in the 1970s by Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
Griggs v. Duke Power Co., , was a court case argued before the United States Supreme Court on December 14, 1970. It concerned employment discrimination and the disparate impact theory and was decided on March 8, 1971...
) that could hold a company liable for practices that resulted in unequal outcomes even if it was not the company’s intention. Other lawsuits of these two types had been realized against companies like Texaco
Texaco
Texaco is the name of an American oil retail brand. Its flagship product is its fuel "Texaco with Techron". It also owns the Havoline motor oil brand....
, CocaCola, Denny's
Denny's
Denny's is a full-service coffee shop/family restaurant chain. It operates over 1,500 restaurants in the United States , Canada, Curaçao, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, Japan , Mexico, New Zealand, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.Denny's is known for always being...
, Chevy Chase Bank
Chevy Chase Bank
Chevy Chase Bank, F.S.B. was the largest locally-based banking company in the Washington Metropolitan Area. It was acquired by Capital One in 2009 and rebranded as Capital One Bank in 2010. Despite its name, Chevy Chase Bank was a federally chartered thrift regulated by the Office of Thrift...
, Sodexho
Sodexho
Sodexo is a French multinational corporation headquartered in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. Sodexo is one of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, with 380,000 employees, representing 130 nationalities, present on 34,000 sites in 80 countries...
and Abercrombie & Fitch
Abercrombie & Fitch
Abercrombie & Fitch is an American retailer that focuses on casual wear for consumers aged 18 to 22. It has over 300 locations in the United States, and is expanding internationally....
. In most of these cases, the judgment went against these companies resulting in the payment of compensation and the implementation of some kind of monitored diversity plan. Elliott herself offered Denny’s as an example of how racism leads to costs via lawsuits. She claimed that Denny’s had to pay $46 million USD for one suit but still had an incident later where a group of black children were not waited on, and so predicted another suit for the restaurant chain.
Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity. Elliott said, “If you can’t think of any other reason for getting rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver.” In fact, by the 1980s many corporations had started to accept much of what diversity training proposed to do, adopting role-playing exercises and terms such as “inclusion”, “mutual learning”, “and “winning together”. By 1994, there were 5,000 diversity trainers in the United States. In 2004, Coca Cola CEO E. Neville Isdell asked a court to extend federal supervision of its diversity policy citing such oversight as a valuable resource. The rationale given for this acceptance is that it not only helps with complying with US federal law but helps profits by reducing employee turnover and increasing market reach.
Diversity training based on Elliott’s methods has been mandated by colleges and universities such as Wake Forest University
Wake Forest University
Wake Forest University is a private, coeducational university in the U.S. state of North Carolina, founded in 1834. The university received its name from its original location in Wake Forest, north of Raleigh, North Carolina, the state capital. The Reynolda Campus, the university's main campus, is...
and Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
. Often these are required after incidents such as the Halloween
Halloween
Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...
party invitations done by the Sigma Chi
Sigma Chi
Sigma Chi is the largest and one of the oldest college Greek-letter secret and social fraternities in North America with 244 active chapters and more than . Sigma Chi was founded on June 28, 1855 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio when members split from Delta Kappa Epsilon...
fraternity chapter at Johns Hopkins which were accused of being racially offensive.
Elliott-inspired diversity training has been realized outside the United States as well. Diversity training was little-known in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
at the beginning of the 1990s; however when The Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 passed in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, it listed 100 diversity training firms in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development is Europe's largest professional institute for people management and development. It is located in Wimbledon, London, England. The organisation has over 135,000 members across 120 countries, and achieved chartered status in 2000...
, 70% of firms have diversity policies in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these courses are designed to have a “lighter touch” than Elliott’s approach, but those based solidly on Elliott’s model are also promoted. Elliott has personally held workshops in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, focusing on racial issues brought up by Pauline Hanson
Pauline Hanson
Pauline Lee Hanson is an Australian politician and former leader of Pauline Hanson's One Nation, a political party with a populist and anti-multiculturalism platform...
and the lack of acknowledgment of contributions made by aborigines in that country. Jane Elliott sells videos and other materials to be used by diversity trainers on her website.
Criticism of Elliott-inspired diversity training
It should be noted that most of the criticisms below reference seminars and/or presentations which loosely adapted Elliott's techniques and with which Elliott had no connection. Elliott has consistently warned presenters and trainers about the dangers of the misuse of her technique and materials.According to supporters of Elliott’s approach, the goal is to reach people’s sense of empathy and morality. It seeks to address a sense of apathy that many people have because they do not think the problem affects them or that they do not believe that they act in a racist manner. Elliott says racism is not inherent: “You are not born a racist. You have to carefully be taught to be one.” And while Jane Elliott created the exercise as a response to racial discrimination, her approach is equally touted to point out sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...
, ageism
Ageism
Ageism, also called age discrimination is stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals or groups because of their age. It is a set of beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values used to justify age based prejudice, discrimination, and subordination...
and homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
as well.
However, it is the manner in which these training sessions are conducted and Elliott’s role as a trainer that has drawn criticism. First, she usually puts the “brown-eyed” participants in the superior position. If the group attending the session is of various races, the ones experiencing discrimination are most likely to be white.
The corporate version of “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” is still based on demeaning a chosen group of people and then letting the temporarily favored group taunt them, much the way the brown-eyed children of the original exercise did, and, according to people of color the way minority group members are treated in this country on a daily basis. Like in the original exercise, she does not explicitly tell participants to mock others but uses choice of language and tone, removal of basic rights (such as being allowed to speak without permission) and a constant changing of the rules to discomfort the blue-eyed participants - a deliberate reversal of what happens in society at large. At the same time she uses positive language, praise and encouragement to the brown-eyed people. One way she does this is with the use of an alternative IQ test called the “Dove Counterbalance Intelligence Test
Chitling Intelligence Test
The Dove Counterbalance General Intelligence Test, informally known as the Chitling Intelligence Test, is an IQ test based on African-American-specific item content, which is often used for instructional purposes in education and psychology. The Chitling Intelligence Test was created by Adrian...
” which asks questions about the black experience of the 1950s and 1960s. “… which presumes that most whites would not be able to answer, thus mimicking the experience that blacks supposedly have with more conventional IQ tests."
At seminars given at U.S. federal agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration
Federal Aviation Administration
The Federal Aviation Administration is the national aviation authority of the United States. An agency of the United States Department of Transportation, it has authority to regulate and oversee all aspects of civil aviation in the U.S...
(FAA), white males were verbally abused by black peers and then forced to walk a gauntlet to be touched by female workers. This, however, is totally irrelevant to Elliott's Blue Eyed/Brown Eyed Exercise, and Elliott is opposed to its being referenced in this article. Jane herself states “When we have multicultural diversity training, one of the first things they have is a dinner where they serve foods from all different lands. Except white. We don’t study white culture ‘cause that’s the right culture’. We already know white culture. We don’t call it white culture, we call it reality.”
Another criticism of such training programs is that they do not permit genuine debate or discussion about the issues to be addressed, even though extensive discussion is encouraged directly following Elliott's exercise, sometimes months after the completion of the exercise, and, in the classroom for the rest of the year.
She has also been accused of not recognizing the social and political changes that have occurred since the era in which she originally developed the exercise. Alan Charles Kors
Alan Charles Kors
Alan Charles Kors is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Dr. Kors graduated summa...
, a conservative professor of history at University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
noted for his defense of students accused of shouting racial slurs in the water buffalo incident
Water buffalo incident
The water buffalo incident was a controversy at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, in which student Eden Jacobowitz was charged with violating the university's racial harassment policy.-History:...
of 1993, writes that Elliott’s exercise teaches “blood-guilt and self-contempt to whites,” adding that “in her view, nothing has changed in American [sic] since the collapse of Reconstruction.”(p. 19)
However, Elliott seems to feel that such an approach is still necessary. She is quoted as saying “I’ve reached a point now where I will no longer tolerate the intolerable. I’m a ball of barbed-wire and I know it.” “After 30 years of dealing with this subject of racism, I am no longer a sweet, gentle person. I want it stopped.” She has also expressed frustration at the idea that she still needs to do this exercise, “It shouldn’t be necessary in 2008,” she says, to “…say things that are difficult for people to hear. I’m not kind about it. But neither are the racists.”
Legacy of the original exercise
She was included in Riceville’s official chronicles which were published to celebrate the town’s 150th anniversary in 2005. And Dean Weaver, who was superintendent of Riceville schools from 1972–1979, thought she was an outstanding teacher who did things differently and made other teachers envious of her success. Ex-principal Steve Harnack commented that she was excellent at teaching academics and suggested she would have had fewer problems with the community if she had involved parents.More than 450 children went through her experiment from 1968 to 1984 and many say that she is “a hero, a teacher extraordinaire, whose simple experiment, which lasted just two days, forever changed their lives.” ( p9) Almost all these students say that they remember the exercise very vividly and that it made them think, and try to be different. As to whether they want their own children or students to experience it, results are mixed. Special education teacher Jay McGovern, who was one of Elliott’s grade school students, says that she was an outstanding teacher but he feels uncertain about what he experienced in her exercise. “The way she did it, she put people down… Today, … You don’t ridicule or berate people to try to make your point. Back in the '60s, there wasn’t that body of research.” (p18) However another student, Dale McCarthy, who went through the exercise in 1969, recalls that while he found the experience “nearly impossible to endure” he realized the benefit the first time he met a black man and shook his hand. He also states that one of his brothers-in-law is black and there is no problem, but adds that if his own daughter had to do that exercise, he would complain to the school. (p20-21)
Academic research into Elliott’s experiment is inconclusive about whether it reduces long-term prejudice or if the possible psychological harm outweighs the potential benefits. She has been accused of scaring people, breaking the school rules, humiliating children, being domineering, angry and brainwashing. Two professors of education in England, Ivor F. Goodson and Pat Sikes, claim unhesistantly that what Elliott did was unethical, calling the experiment psychologically and emotionally damaging. They also stated ethical concerns connected to the fact that the children were not told of the purpose of the exercise beforehand. Long term results of the diversity training for adults are also unknown. In some courses, participants can wind up feeling frustrated about “their inability to change” and instead begin to feel anger against the very groups they are supposed to be more sensitive to. It can also lead to anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or being offended. However, three years after Elliott's original exercise, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa conducted an attitudinal survey of the third- to sixth-grade students in the Riceville Community School and in the third- to sixth-grade students in a comparable community to measure their attitudes concerning racism. When the results were compiled, not only were Elliott's former students less racist in their responses as measured by this survey, than were their fellow students, but ALL the students in the third- to sixth-grades in the Riceville school were less racist than the students in the comparable community. The associate professor concluded that not only were Elliott's students attitudes positively changed by the exercise, but their attitudes were ameliorating the attitudes of their peers.