Teaching prejudice: the blue eye-brown eye experiment. 

 

“In order to punish him, society has the right to oppose him in its entirety. It is an unequal struggle: on one side are all the forces, all the power, all the rights... he is nothing less than a traitor, a “monster.” How could society not have an absolute right over him?” 

– Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 

 

It was the evening of the death of Martin Luther King Jr, the 4th of April 1968. His body lay in the morgue of St Joseph’s Hospital bearing fatal injuries to his cheek, neck and vertebrae from a single bullet that had ripped through with such force the tie he had been wearing still lay shredded on the ground outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Walter Cronkite, CBS News anchor, announced that evening, “the apostle of non-violence and the civil rights movement, Nobel Peace prize winner, and Negro Leader,” had died. In an address to the nation President Lyndon B. Johnson called on his citizens for calm, a vengeful national uprising weighing anxiously on his mind: “America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King. I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr King, who lived by non-violence.” That evening there was genuine fear for civil unrest. 

 

But it was an eight o’clock news report in which a white skinned reporter set up his interview with a black minister of the church that is the reason for this story. Whether the racist observation was meant consciously or not, listen carefully to what the white reporter asked the black minister of the church: 

 

“When our leader [John F Kennedy] was killed five years ago, his widow Jackie Kennedy held us together. Who is going to control your people?”.

 

*

 

Eight hundred miles north of Memphis lies a small rural town surrounded by cornfields and farmland, with a population of around nine hundred ‘small town folk’. Riceville, Iowa was then and still is now the home of corn farmers, working class, homogenous, white. There were no ghettos in Riceville. There were no violent protests, no campuses holding demonstrations. There were no sit ins at segregated cafes and none of the nationwide riots or the Long Hot Summer of 1967 made it to its streets. “We have no negroes here,” remarked one of its residents. Riceville was far removed from the television programmes and news features relaying the civil rights issues of the late sixties. Social unrest was seen in faraway cities, from the comfort of living rooms, but never experienced first-hand. That is not to say Riceville was a utopia: its citizens were poor, their prospects were few. 

 

Watching the evening news from Riceville was a young elementary school teacher, Miss Jane Elliott. She stood in slippers behind an ironing board on top of which lay a colourful tepee that was to be used as a prop for the following day’s lesson: walk a mile in his moccasins. The idea for her lesson was inspired by a poem written in 1895 by Mary Lathrap: 

 

Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps, 

Or stumbles along the road.

Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears, 

Or stumbled beneath the same load.

 

Elliott’s lesson plan was to show her third grade (eight-year-old) children, through experience and empathy, the hardships faced by the indigenous community. What would it feel like to have your home, your tepee, taken from you? What would it feel like to be outcast from your own land? How could we be better individuals so that others didn’t feel this way? As many who embark on teaching careers will understand, there is a deep compulsion, particularly at the beginning, to teach children things that cannot be learnt from a textbook, or from a story read out in a dramatic voice. To teach things that cannot be written on a chalk board, spoon fed and memorised for the purpose of regurgitation during examinations. There is a compulsion to teach lessons that are understood and felt. Knowledge not of things, but knowledge in things as Sartre would say.

 

But something about the sentence she’d heard on the television distracted her, then incensed her: 

 

“When our leader was killed five years ago, his widow Jackie Kennedy held us together. Who is going to control your people?”. 

 

Years later, after gaining fame, when Elliott was asked what prompted her to do what she did, she said she believed it was that sentence. That this reporter had inferred the president was only the president of the whites made it clear there was a long way to go before racial inequalities could truly be overcome. She felt “they were talking as if they were subhuman, as if they needed to be controlled and contained. I just found it so arrogant, so condescending, so ungodly.” 

 

And so, the colourful tepee was set aside and the lesson replanned. Instead, Elliott designed a roleplay which touched on the issues of segregation and discrimination - she would teach the children the feeling of powerlessness and powerfulness, of oppression and control. Unknown to her at the time, Elliot’s 1968 exercise, conducted the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, would not only become a talking point amongst social psychologists all over the world but would, decades later, still be taught in university lecture halls because of its ability to demonstrate the mechanisms of prejudice and groupthink. Eventually, the 'Blue Eye Brown Eye Exercise' would earn Elliott a place among Maria Montessori, Booker T Washington, Plato and Confucius as one of the most influential educationalists of all time. 

 

The first child to bring up the news the following morning was a nine-year-old boy called Steven. On entering the classroom, he asked his teacher, 

“Why did they shoot that King?” 

Miss Elliot directed it back to the class: “What do you think it is like to be a black boy or a black girl?” 

Several murmured, but nothing passionate or with conviction. 

“Anything else?” 

Silence. 

“Have a think, there is no wrong answer.” 

Silence. 

“What is the difference between people who are black, and people who are white?” 

A sheepish reply came from one little girl with her hand in the air, speaking almost in a whisper.  

“They are not as clever as us.”

 

It started with a distinction that was arbitrary in an all-white classroom. Miss Elliott divided the class into two groups:

“We are going to do something different today. Now. What colour eyes do you have? No, no saying, just thinking. Do you have blue eyes, or do you have brown, or green eyes?”

The kids looked around, slightly bemused, eyeing each other like little owls. 

“If you have blue eyes, I want you to go and stand by the window. If you have brown eyes, or green eyes, or anything not blue, you must go stand by the door. Ok, ready? Go.”

And so it began.

 

The first task the blue-eyed group had was to tie a small brown collar around the neck of each brown-eyed child, which they did promptly. This delineated each brown eyed child – so even from a distance the other children would know, this was a brown eyed child. The class were then told about how the rules for that day were about to change. The blue eyed, superior, children were given special allowances that day. They were given five extra minutes to play in the playground. They were allowed to climb on the apparatus and allowed to go on the swings, whilst the brown-eyed children were only allowed to watch. At playtime the blue-eyed children ran around gleefully, making use of the extra apparatus and being able to take longer turns on the swings now that the brown-eyed children could not use them. Resources tend to be plentiful when the inferior group is denied them. They were allowed to eat their lunch first and were allowed second helpings if they wanted them. They were also given the authority to designate where the brown eyed children were allowed to sit. The superior children chose seats at the front of the classroom and designated the inferior children to the back of the classroom. That day, if you had blue eyes in Miss Elliott’s class, you were going to have a privileged day.  

​

It did not take much persuasion from non-accurate facts masquerading as science to change the minds of eight-year-olds. 

 

“MELANIN,” wrote Miss Elliott on her chalkboard. “This is the chemical that causes blue eyes. People who have this are scientifically more likely to be clever. Repeat after me: Blue eyed people are smarter,” 

The children looked around at each other, confused as to whether it was right to say such a thing. 

 “Blue eyed people are cleaner. Blue eyed people are more… civilised.”

“That’s not true,” piped up one child. 

“Of course it is, Laurie,” replied Miss Elliott. “Now, did you or did you not forget your glasses this morning?” 

“I forgot them,” Laurie answered quietly, looking down at her shoes. 

“And what colour eyes do you have?” 

“Brown, Miss Elliott.” 

 

As the day wore on, an interesting dynamic started to emerge. The brown-eyed children, exasperated by the injustice they were experiencing, started to feel miserable. Their shoulders drooped. They huddled together in the playground, not moving, not laughing as they would normally do. The blue-eyed children meanwhile appeared more confident, allowing themselves at times crude displays of authority over the brown-eyed children and walking with an air of mockery. Some used their new found privilege to taunt the inferior group. When one brown-eyed child was slow to finish her maths work, a blue-eyed child remarked that this was obviously because of her eye colour. It incensed the brown-eyed child to tears. 

 

In a later interview Miss Elliott described how she witnessed “what had been wonderful, marvellous, cooperative children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little children. It was shocking - especially the behaviour of the children put into the superior group. The one day we removed their inhibitions and taught them they were better than the others - they turned ghastly.” 

When one brown-eyed child was slow to finish her maths work, a blue-eyed child remarked that this was obviously because of her eye colour. It enraged the brown-eyed child to tears. 

“What happened at recess?” Miss Elliott asked another child from the inferior group.

“I wanted to punch him. Punch him in the gut,” came a feverish reply from a child sitting with his arms crossed over his little chest, frowning. 

“I felt angry. He called me Brown-y.” 

As the day wore on the brown-eyed children took longer to complete their work. They made more mistakes. They stopped smiling. They started to lose their confidence: a brown-eyed girl who had never had problems with multiplication made several mistakes in a test. A phonics exercise which usually took three minutes to complete, took several minutes that day. The children sat quietly and hardly spoke. 

“Why do you think the phonics cards are taking so long today?” Miss Elliott asked. 

“I just feel really sad. All I can think about is this collar around my neck.”

Meanwhile the superior children were gaining confidence in their schoolwork. Some attempted and succeeded with advanced mathematics tasks which they could not do previously. 

 

At the end of the day the class was asked to reflect on what had happened. 

“I felt like I wanted to quit school today.” 

“I felt like a dog on a leash. I felt like I was in prison.” 

“Well I felt like a king! Like I ruled them brown eyes. Like I was better than them. I felt happy,” announced a blue-eyed child named Raymond. 

 

Meanwhile in the staff room, Miss Elliot asked another teacher how she was teaching her class about Martin Luther King. 

“I’m not,” came the reply, delivered with a shrug. “I thought it was about time someone shot that son of a bitch.” 

 

*

So reflecting on the question: 

 

“When our leader [John F Kennedy] was killed five years ago, his widow Jackie Kennedy held us together. Who is going to control your people?”. In reality, our system of institutionalised othering has made it so that the blue eyed exert their power and dominance over the brown eyed. Meaning the simplest way to answer this question is “the superior group will”.

​

By writing ‘MELANIN’ in large letters on a chalkboard, a teacher convinced eight-year-old children that people with brown eyes were biologically inferior to people with blue eyes. In reality, we all succumb to subtle and consistent messaging that results in the internalisation of thoughts on group hierarchy. It is easily done. Every single one of us has the propensity to both categorise and give value to the pigmentation of an individual’s skin tone, and by extension categorise and give value to the cultural attributes of that skin tone. 

​

*

 

We fear, and are revulsed by, the image of the young London gang member. The Roadman, the G, the Wasteman, are the nomenclatures we give to this man who is reported in the news to pick up our young children from chicken shops and coerce them to sell drugs over county lines. He stabs teenagers. Many die. He contributes to the rising rates of gang crime and homicides in London, now on par with New York. If someone were to ask you to think about the characteristics of the Roadman – his regional accent, the music he listens to, the food he eats, the norms he conforms to, the way he acts, the family values he has, his parenting techniques, his motivations in life, his bank balance, his ability to conform to social norms, his academic performance, the clothes he wears – a set of uniforms to adorn him will come to mind. This is not accidental. It is Foucauldian, and Foucault says that we give the Delinquent in society a set of characteristics, which they must conform to. They need to conform to them – they need to, because those who dominate the societal narrative cannot attribute deviation from the norm and criminal behaviour to those that are us; they must be Other. We dismiss, for example, the fundamental economic principle of supply and demand when we enter into debates about county lines: the demand for the drugs comes from middle class weed smokers, trading floor bankers, estate agents, weekend coke takers, university ravers, festival goers, individuals now in their 70s tending to allotments but still living in the marijuana haze of their younger days. In dismissing ourselves from the debate it makes it not only for easier scapegoating but a neatly packaged and nicer way to say, even though his colour wasn’t mentioned once in this paragraph, ‘the black boy is the problem’.