We have just announced the second edition of the “For a Quebec without racism” award. This is a great opportunity to tell you about Jane Elliott’s classroom experience. It is one of the most famous episodes in the recent history of the fight against racism at school, and that of pedagogy.
“Racism and hatred are not enshrined in the deadly sins. They are however the worst, ”assured Jacques Prévert. He was just aiming once again.
But how do you talk about it in class? How to define it? How to adapt your message to the age and identity of the recipients? How to talk about it in a fair way and without indoctrinating? How to fight effectively against it?
Anyone who has taught knows the difficulties all this raises.
Let’s go to Riceville (Iowa), April 5, 1968. The small community (population of about 800 souls…) is middle class and entirely white. This is where young Jane Elliott (born in 1933, she is still alive) teaches third grade.
Martin Luther King was assassinated the day before, and Mrs. Elliott is about to lead an exercise in her class that will make her as immensely famous as it is controversial.
Melanin explains everything
“We killed ML King, you know why? she asks the students. To understand her struggle and her sad end, she thinks, you have to have experienced discrimination, to know what it is like to be a young black person, a young black person in the United States, at this moment. An idea comes to him.
Mme Elliott divides his class into two groups: students with brown (or green) eyes on one side; the blue-eyed ones on the other.
Brown eyes, like skin or hair, she explains to the students, owe their color to an important chemical ingredient: melatonin, which also determines… intelligence (which is obviously false). Guidelines are announced. For example, the blues will have to use a paper cup to drink from the fountain, so as not to contaminate the browns.
And amazing things happen, she reports. Browns are confident and sometimes even show arrogance, even contempt, towards blues. Some of the latter seem to confine themselves to their mediocre status, to assume it.
It was on Friday.
The following Monday, Mr.me Elliott reverses the roles. It is, this time, the browns who are inferior, lazy, not brilliant. And the blues who are the superior beings.
Same effects. And when, at the end of the day, the exercise ends, the students are moved. Some are upset and cry.
Follow-ups and debates
The story has only just begun for M.me Elliott. On the one hand, she will become famous, invited to very popular TV shows to talk about her exercise, which she will do again for more than ten years, before becoming the subject of a documentary and a sought-after anti-racist speaker, in particular in schools and universities. It is given as one of the precursors of diversity training. A textbook in education places her even alongside Plato, Montessori and others among the great educators and pedagogues.
In Riceville, which she will leave, things are not going so well. The population sees it as inviting black people to come and settle in Rice—”they’ll go out with our young people and maybe even marry them off!” — and has reservations about what she did to the children.
In part of the population, there are also reservations and criticisms on the ethical and professional level. Is it defensible to do such an exercise? Shouldn’t the agreement of the parents and the management be necessary to proceed? And that of an ethics committee? What about a white woman talking to young white people about what black people are going through?
I leave you to think about it, but to help you in your reflection, I suggest this article, in which we wanted to test the effectiveness of this exercise to change the attitudes of non-black teachers in training towards black students.
Here are the conclusions reported by the authors.
The subjects found the experience positive, but the statistical evidence for the simulation’s effectiveness in changing racial attitudes in a positive direction is not strong. The long-term effects of simulation on behavior change could not be adequately determined.
In addition, the stress experienced by the participants and the facilitator of the simulation must be taken into account: subjecting subjects to an exercise in which some experience prejudice and discrimination raises important ethical questions. Even if the outcome was geared towards worthy ends (through emotional role-playing, sympathizing with oppressed members of society), is the exposure to ridicule and unfair treatment justified?
Finally: “Our results did not strongly and unequivocally indicate that the simulation ‘blue eyes – brown eyes’ was an effective means of positively modifying the racial attitudes of the students in training”.
The article quoted: Deborah A. Byrnes and Gary Kiger, “ The Effect of a Prejudice-Reduction Simulation on Attitude Change », Journal of Applied Social Psychology, flight. 20, no. 4, p. 341-356.