Blue Eyes Brown Eyes

The never-before-told true story of Jane Elliott and the “Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment” she made world-famous, using eye color to simulate racism. The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher in rural Iowa, introduced to her all-white third-grade class a shocking experiment to demonstrate the scorching impact of racism. Elliott separated students into two groups. She instructed the brown-eyed children to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. Without telling the children the experiment’s purpose, Elliott demonstrated how easy it was to create abhorrent racist behavior based on students’ eye color, not skin color. As a result, Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and thousands of media events and diversity-training sessions worldwide, during which she employed the provocative experiment to induce racism. Was the experiment benign? Or was it a cruel, self-serving exercise in sadism? Did it work? Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes is a meticulously researched book that details for the first time Jane Elliott’s jagged rise to stardom. It is an unflinching assessment of the incendiary experiment forever associated with Elliott, even though she was not the first to try it out. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes offers an intimate portrait of the insular community where Elliott grew up and conducted the experiment on the town’s children for more than a decade. The searing story is a cautionary tale that examines power and privilege in and out of the classroom. It also documents small-town White America’s reflex reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the subsequent meteoric rise of diversity training that flourishes today. All the while, Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes reveals the struggles that tormented a determined and righteous woman, today referred to as the “Mother of Diversity Training,” who was driven against all odds to succeed.

Jane Elliott is an educator who began her career in a third-grade classroom in Riceville, Iowa, and over the past fifty years has become an educator of people of all ages all over the U.S. and abroad.The Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed Exercise which she devised to help her students to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.'s work, has been cited and studied by psychologists and sociologists all over the world. Elliott lives in a remodeled schoolhouse twenty-one miles from where she was born. She remains stedfast in her belief that there is only one race, THE HUMAN RACE, of which we are all members.

Helps preschoolers learn that God made different types of people and loves them all the same.

"The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Jane Elliott, a third-grade schoolteacher in rural Iowa, tried out a shocking experiment to show the scorching impact of racism on children. Elliott separated her students according to the color of their. Those with brown eyes would lord over those with blue eyes. The brown-eyed students were given permission to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. The Blue-Eyed, Brown-Eyed Experiment would become world famous. Elliott would go on to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, followed by a stormy White House conference, and tens of thousands of media events and diversity training sessions around the world. Elliott taught 'Black Lives Matter' fifty years before the phrase was ever uttered. Yet the small town where Elliott began the incendiary experiment never forgot or forgave her. She paid a price for her hard-fought fame. But was Elliott the benign and enlightened mother of diversity she claimed to be? The damage she caused still reverberates. An indelible, confounding portrait of a woman driven to succeed, set against the backdrop of a proud and upright farming community."--

A child's eyes truly tell wonders, revealing personality, thoughts and feelings of the heart. Beautiful Blue Eyes, a sweet story with engaging illustrations, celebrates the unique spirit of the blue-eyed boy or girl. I watched, and I waited as your eyes chose their hue, deciding in time on their beautiful blue. Blue as a butterfly wing or the sparkly sea. Blue as the birdy singing in her tree.

Examines how a "discrimination" exercise in 1970 affected children participants then and in 1984

A wondrous tale of the dark woods of Scotland. A holiday trip gone wrong, a perfect holiday ripped apart by nature. A young girl left alone in the depths of the forest is found by a Hiker that cares. He resolves to look after her and to get her to the Hospital that she needs to attend. He will do anything to get her there and see that she is alright. They are a long way from salvation and the medicine that home promises. They are in the dark woods of Northern Argyll where only, woodsmen, nature buffs and walkers exist. There are no roads, no cars, few tractors other than those working the land. There is only Rob, the man that loves walking in the forests, and the poor girl that he has found wrapped in the brambles of an abandoned building. Hurt, Abused, perhaps raped, Rob makes it his mission to save her but they are out in the wilds of Scotland. They are a long way from help, a long way from salvation. Rob is going to save her. Rob is going to save her no matter what it takes.