A Bold Experiment
This article was featured on 3qd a while back, but I’ve only gotten around to reading it just now. And it’s very, very powerful:
On the morning of april 5, 1968, a Friday, Steven Armstrong stepped into Jane Elliott’s third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa. “Hey, Mrs. Elliott,” Steven yelled as he slung his books on his desk.
“They shot that King yesterday. Why’d they shoot that King?”
All 28 children found their desks, and Elliott said she had something special for them to do, to begin to understand the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. the day before. “How do you think it would feel to be a Negro boy or girl?” she asked the children, who were white. “It would be hard to know, wouldn’t it, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves. Would you like to find out?”
…That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott
began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”
…On Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the brown-eyed kids were told how shifty, dumb and lazy theywere. Later, it would occur to Elliott that the blueys were much less nasty than the brown-eyed kids had been, perhaps because the blue-eyed kids had felt the sting of being ostracized and didn’t want to inflict it on their former tormentors.
…Hundreds of viewers [of the Tonight Show] wrote letters saying Elliott’s work appalled them. “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children,” one said. “Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.”
We forget so easily what the world was like– and even more easily, how similar in ways it still is (until something happens to remind us).
