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 …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