Summary Of Jane Elliott's Experiment

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Jane Elliott was an elementary schoolteacher during the marches of Martin Luther King Jr. After seeing him talk, she conducted an experiment with the children in her classroom. The experiment was separating the kids based eye color and the purpose was to illustrate how racism felt. Children would be told how to act in the beginning, racist to blue eyed kids. The experiment was effective in showing the power racism had on the children. Today, she conducts the same experiment with adults and doing this she helps them feel the pain that racism creates in America. This video showed me people’s emotions from racism, how racism can be created, and showed different forms of racism. In the video, Jane Elliott put blue eye people into a place of inferiority. All of the people with blue eyes were white. They, for the time in their lives, got to feel the hatred found in racism. Before they were ignorant to the feeling of being inferior and now with this feeling they were crying in their chairs. Overwhelmed with emotion, the blue-eyed people started to understand the torment minorities go through in our society. …show more content…

Racism is not just part of a society, but built into the society. In American, racism came from the use of slavery and the effects of slavery can be found in American today. The experiment with blue eyes should how racism could easily be created. Once groups were divided on eye color it because simple to created racism round the ideas on us and them. Those people over there don’t have brown eyes so they must be stupid and undeveloped to us. By shaming the blue-eyed people the brown-eyed people feel a sense of power and superiority. The group quickly was able to establish racism and act as though it had been there of