"Blue eyed" is a workshop by Jane Elliott on intimidation and discrimination, filmed by Bertram Verhaag.

Quote:
Blue Eyed offers viewers a chance to watch a full-length workshop with America's most dynamic diversity trainer, Jane Elliott.

Elliott's exercise, initiated in 1968 as a ground breaking experiment in anti-racist training, has been featured on Today, the Tonight show, Donahue, Oprah, ABC News and PBS' Frontline. Elliott believes, "Blue Eyed is by far the most comprehensive and useful video on my work available; it sums up 28 years of experience in schools, universities and corporations."

Elliott contends that "A person who has been raised and socialized in America has been conditioned to be a racist... We live in two countries, one black and one white." In contrast to the more usual encounter group strategy, the feisty Elliott believes it's important for whites to experience the emotional impact of discrimination for themselves.

In Blue Eyed, we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City - blacks, Hispanics, whites, women and men. The blue-eyed members are subjected to pseudo-scientific explanations of their inferiority, culturally biased IQ tests and blatant discrimination. In just a few hours under Elliott's withering regime, we watch grown professionals become despondent and distracted, stumbling over the simplest commands.

Jane Elliott's approach is especially relevant today. It demonstrates irrefutably that even without juridical discrimination, hate speech, lowered expectations and dismissive behavior can have devastating effects on minority achievement. Black members of the Blue-Eyed group forcefully remind whites that they undergo similar stresses, not just for a few hours in a controlled experiment, but every day of their lives. And Elliott points out that sexism, homophobia and ageism work in the same way.

Back at her Iowa home, Elliott reflects upon how the simple classroom exercise she devised the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's assassination has transformed her life. After her experiment got national television coverage, she recalls, townspeople made threatening phone calls, beat and spit at her children and boycotted her parents' coffee shop, eventually forcing it out of business.

Clips from her original classes and interviews with former students confirm that Jane Elliott's workshops make them permanently more empathetic and sensitive to the problem of racism. Counselors, student program administrators, corporate trainers and psychologists agree: Blue Eyed is a film every American needs to experience.

http://www.atsmedia.com/scripts/cat_Det ... Position=4
http://newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0015

Thanks to leila for these links.

I'm very sorry for the poor video quality, recorded some years ago from TV, then lost but just rediscovered and hopefully converted and cleansed from advertisements, discovery sharks and farao's into a convenient format for KG. The film is relatively expensive or hard to get and its content doesn't corrode that easy, so I hope the quality can be forgiven.

At 73, Jane Elliott still receives death threats and is bundled out of town after giving seminars, because police fear a riot. It's quite a reaction for a small-town teacher who only wanted to give her class an answer to the question: "Why did someone kill Martin Luther King?" She recalls that fateful morning of 5 April 1968

"I was teaching third grade in all-white, all-Christian Riceville, Iowa, a town of about 1000 people where I was born. Martin Luther King Jr had been one of our "heroes of the month" in February, and now I was going to have to explain to my class why anyone would want to kill him.

I knew they wouldn't understand if we just talked. So I decided to teach them the Sioux prayer: "Oh great spirit let me not judge a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins", and to let them walk a mile in the shoes of a child of colour, based on eye colour rather than skin colour.

Since I'm blue-eyed and most of the kids were blue-eyed, I first put blue-eyed people at the bottom of the hierarchy, giving them armbands and setting them apart from the brown-eyed and green-eyed kids. I told them the brown-eyed are the better people, cleaner and smarter. I wrote "melanin" on the blackboard and said it was what caused intelligence. The more you had, and the dark-eyed people had more, the smarter you were.

I told them blue-eyed people were stupid, that they sat around doing nothing, and if you gave them nice things, they wrecked them. I could feel gaps opening up in the classroom. I even said blue-eyed people had to drink from paper cups if they used the water fountain - and asked the kids why. One answered that the brown-eyed children might catch something from the blue-eyed.

Then one kid asked me: "How come you're the teacher then if you've got blue eyes?" Another piped up: "If she had brown eyes, she'd be principal or superintendent because they've both got brown eyes." I realised that white kids really do know how racism works. The next day I reversed the roles. None of the parents of the children who took part in that exercise complained, though others did after subsequent exercises.

We vaccinate children to protect against diseases they might encounter, so I see my exercise as an inoculation against the racism that they will encounter. I know it works because I asked the kids to write about how they felt during the two parts of the exercise, and about what discrimination was. Those kids wrote brilliant things: "The kids with blue eyes got to discriminate against the people with brown eyes. I have brown eyes and I felt like hitting them if I wanted to." One wrote that they felt like quitting school now that they knew what it was like to be discriminated against. Years later, the now grown-up children tell me they never forgot the exercise.

But there's more. The first time I did the exercise there were seven dyslexic boys in the class, and four of them were brown-eyed. On the day the brown-eyed children were on top, they read words I knew they couldn't read and spelled words I knew they couldn't spell. I also watched the Lutheran minister's brilliant daughter fall to pieces because she just could not succeed on the day she had the wrong colour eyes. I watched the kids finding out that teachers lied to them about their abilities - and saw them decide that they were never going to live down to teachers' lies again. What stereotyping does to learning has already been studied elsewhere, but when it comes to race we don't apply it.

I've done this exercise many times in many places now. I've been hit by a white man, I've had a knife pulled on me, I've been threatened with death numerous times. I got taken out of Union Town, Pennsylvania, at midnight in 1974 when some teachers I'd put through the exercise informally called the superintendent and said if you don't get that bitch out of town we're going to shoot her.

My background is plain, ordinary white American, except that my father was an Irish Baptist and my mother an Irish Catholic whose family disowned her because she had married a non-Catholic. She taught us to hate my father's family, which gave us some insight into what it is like to be irrationally discriminated against.

The "blue eyes, brown eyes" exercise ought to be part of teacher training, with people other than me doing it. I hate it because I have to become what I've sworn I would never become - a bigot and a bitch - in order to run the exercise.

I have a few good friends and a number of close relatives left in Riceville, but some time ago, after my father died, my mother told me not to come around. To this day, 20 per cent of the town still call me a nigger lover."