Jane Elliot Experiment Summary

In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr Jane Elliot a third-grade teacher performed an experiment with her students about racism. In the video, fourteen years later her former students who were in her third-grade class come back and watch the video to watch how she taught them about discrimination in a distinctive way. This experiment was conducted in two days on her third-grade students. In her experiment, she on one day made one group of her students the blue eyes superior and the brown eyes inferior. To conduct her experiment, she told the class that the superior group the blue eyes were smarter and are better than the brown eyed people. On the first day of the experiment she made the brown eyed students wear collars to distinguish them between as brown and blue eyed. Furthermore, on the second day she switched the collars so that the blue eyed would wear the collars instead of the brown eyed. She told the superior group that they were not allowed to talk to the inferior group, did not have to drink out of a cup rather than the fountain and had extra time for recess. After the former students and some of their spouses in attendance watched the video they had a discussion after watching the video to determine if after performing the experiment did their views change. In addition, in the video Jane Elliot was hired to perform the same experiment that she did on her former students on the Iowa Department of Corrections. The prison guards and parole officers were separated into two different groups categorized as brown and blue-eyed individuals. The blue-eyed individuals had to wear collars, had limited space, and watched the brown eyed individuals enter the room before them and were told to wait outside the room past the original time. Furthermore, in the video she shows how the blue-eyed individuals are disrespectful, uncooperative, and rude. After the experiment, she interpreted and helped the individuals analyze the experiment to show them how minorities are treated in the country. What I learned was when Jane’s students went to do the phonic cards with her she noticed that the students who were inferior the first day of the experiment took a longer time to get through the cards but on the second day they went through the cards in half of the time. Also, same thing happened to the students who were superior the first day they were able to go through the phonics cards …show more content…
In the video, one of the individuals told a white woman that when she wakes up in the morning she doesn’t wake up knowing that she is different or that there are stigmas and stereotypes against her. Whereas someone who is of color wakes up knowing that there stereotypes and go through life different then someone who is white. In this video, she shows that while the people who are white in this video they can walk away from racism while for people of color they cannot walk away from racism or the stereotypes. Furthermore, this video showed how people who are discriminated against something they have no control over such as their skin. This video showed how it feels to be oppressed due to a physical characteristic that the individual can not