This is the story of how we can demonstrate White Privilege, but rather than skin color, we use eye color.
Lesson of a Lifetime
"Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage"
By Stephen G. Bloom Sep 2006
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/
"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?”"
More.
"Riceville, Iowa, was the unlikely setting for a controversial classroom exercise created by Jane Elliott. She insists it strengthened their character. Critics say it abused their trust. (Layne Kennedy)
“She was like a cult leader,” says former mayor Walt Gabelmann (across from Riceville Town Hall) about Elliott. “Some of the old people wanted to tar-and-feather her.” (Layne Kennedy)
Soon after her students’ reports appeared in the town paper in 1968, Elliott (in her old classroom this past May) became famous. (Layne Kennedy)
Her bold experiment to teach Iowa third graders about racial prejudice divided townspeople and thrust her onto the national stage
" . . . Riceville, population 840, who all but ran her [Elliott] out of town, and to thousands of people around the world who have also participated in an exercise based on the experiment. (She prefers the term “exercise.”) It is sometimes cited as a landmark of social science. The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill has listed her on a timeline of key educators, along with Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Horace Mann, Booker T. Washington, Maria Montessori and 23 others. Yet what Elliott did continues to stir controversy. One scholar asserts that it is “Orwellian” and teaches whites “self-contempt.” A columnist at a Denver newspaper called it “evil.”
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 browneyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”"
More.
"When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned. Typical of their responses was that of Debbie Hughes, who reported that “the people in Mrs. Elliott’s room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to. I got to have five minutes extra of recess.” The next day when the tables were turned, “I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”"
More not shocking fatcs about this story; i.e. "White Privilege!
"“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.
”Elliott replied, “Why are we so worried about the fragile egos of white children who experience a couple of hours of made-up racism one day when blacks experience real racism every day of their lives?”"
White Privilege! How dare we allow white kids to go thru what black kids go thru every day?
"Brian, the Elliotts’ oldest son, got beaten up at school, and Jane called the ringleader’s mother. “Your son got what he deserved,” the woman said.
When Sarah, the Elliotts’ oldest daughter, went to the girls’ bathroom in junior high, she came out of a stall to see a message scrawled in red lipstick on the mirror: “Nigger lover.”"
White fear! Why do white people fear people with black or dark brown skin?
