Abstract
On the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa felt impelled to give her students a visceral experience of discrimination that they would never forget. She divided them into two groups and told them one was genetically inferior to the other. The next day, she reversed the hierarchy. It was a powerful exercise the children never forgot, and one which propelled teacher Jane Elliott to national attention. Our editor interviewed Elliott 40 years later, on February 4, 2008, just before the Democratic nomination process, on the topic of “Hate and Gender.”
Highlights
On the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa felt impelled to give her students a visceral experience of discrimination that they would never forget
EPPINGA: In 1968, you conducted your famous Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, in which you told your third-graders that children of one eye color were superior in intelligence and were not to play with children of the other eye color, resulting in the supposedly superior group’s tormenting of the “inferior” group
EPPINGA: Are you saying that you believe that people who have been oppressed learn enough from the experience that they are not going to become oppressors?
Summary
On the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa felt impelled to give her students a visceral experience of discrimination that they would never forget. (laughter) After we do the exercise, the first thing that happens is, some male says, “If women get power they’re going to want to treat us the way we’ve treated them”—which says very plainly they know how they’ve treated us, and they don’t want to be on the receiving end of that.
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