Colour of Harmony (2)

"How can color blind people be without racial discriminations?"

Jane Elliott (born 1933, Riceville, Iowa)[citation needed] is an American teacher and anti-racism activist. She created the famous “blue-eyed/brown-eyed” exercise, first done with grade school children in the 1960s, and which later became the basis for her career in diversity training.

Please read Jane Elliot, origin of the idea at Wikipedia here .

An interesting article I found on the Internet:

"Just out of curiosity, are there any color blind people here? I've always wondered what it would like to be color blind and how it would affect the saneness of an individual. With the issue of racism and skin color being a ongoing issue, do any of you people who are color blind have trouble distinguishing race sometimes? what are some of the major issues you guys deal with in everyday life or have you guys adapted to a certain point where your color blindness doesn't hold you back at all?"

When I was schooling many years ago, I came across a "first person" article in the Reader's Digest contributed by a school teacher located in the United States.

Unfortunately, I had lost that Reader's Digest issue published over 45 years ago. Any kind soul who has a copy of that article, or know how an archive available in Reader's Digest, please loan it to me and to reproduce it on this blog, with permission.

Without the Reader's Digest published article (month, year, title issue unknown), my "memory aid" is based on my vague memories with the gist below:

The contributor was an American junior school teacher working on an experimental educational project.

I couldn't find the same Reader's Digest article. However, the wonders of the Internet with the help of a Google search found me the following:

Brown vs. Blue Eyes:
A Class Divided. The photo herein is of a child during a famous experiment in the psychology of racism and prejudice. This blue-eyed child reacts after a collar is placed on him, and informed brown-eyed people were actually superior.

The day prior blue-eyes were superior, the brown-eyes had the collar, and within minutes the brown-eyed children were enduring a crippling dehumanization.

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE's on video entitled "A Class Divided" , A Classic Discrimination Experiment .

It is about an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives.



Check out the result of the classroom experiment which was implemented in March,1985 and the same experiment I read in Reader's Digest, with adults 14 years later to view the video.

If you have the time, please do. The unpretentious tone, voice and emotion, the facial expression, the body language you could view from the video at a seminar which was produced without script and unrehearsed.

Alternatively, the "transcript" is available from Frontline: A Class Divided.

Please print the "to-go" or "take-away" version of the script for easy reference and convenience. Thank you for reading.

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