Jane Elliot UP007



Jane Elliott is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise. Jane Elliott promotes the idea that there is only one race in race relations, which is namely the human race. She first conducted her famous exercise for her class on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

The exercise labels students as inferior or superior based on the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. For decades, Ms. Elliott repeated the exercise around the country, including in 1992 on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and she would witness more or less the same outcome: people turning on each other on the basis of eye color.