Jane Elliott (' Jennison; born November 30, 1933) is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, Elliott became known for the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise she created to teach students about the effects of discrimination and racial stereotyping. She first conducted the exercise with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The local newspaper's publication of compositions that the children had written about the experience led to much broader media interest in it.
The classroom exercise was filmed in 1970, becoming the documentary The Eye of the Storm. PBS series Frontline featured a reunion of the 1970 class, as well as Elliott's work with adults, in its 1985 episode "A Class Divided". Invitations to speak and to conduct her exercise eventually led Elliott to give up school teaching and to become a full-time public speaker against discrimination. She has directed the exercise and lectured on its effects in many places throughout the world. She also has conducted the exercise with college students, as seen in the 2001 documentary The Angry Eye.
Early life and career
Elliott was born in 1933 to Lloyd and Margaret (Benson) Jennison on her family's farm in or near Riceville, Iowa. She was the fourth of several<!--Smithsonian Mag says 5; UI Papers says 7--> children.
In 1952, after graduating from high school, Elliott attended the Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), where she attained an emergency elementary teaching certificate in five quarters. In 1953, she began teaching in a one-room school in Randall.
Elliott then decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans with a lesson she had planned about Martin Luther King Jr. for February's Hero of the Month project. At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, Elliott says she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins."
She wanted to give her small-town, all-white students the experience of walking in a "colored child's moccasins for a day".
The next Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned.
As news of her exercise spread, Elliott appeared on more television shows and started to repeat the exercise in professional training days for adults. On December 15, 1970, Elliott staged the experience to adult educators at a White House Conference on Children and Youth. This documentary was intended, according to the producers in their agreement with Jane Elliott, to create an awareness of the effects of racist behavior. After the exercise, Elliott said the result "wasn't as successful as I am accustomed to being", leaving journalist Andrew Anthony with the "nagging suspicion that she's more excited by white fear than she is by black success."
Elliott was featured by Peter Jennings on ABC as "Person of the Week" on April 24, 1992. She is listed on the timeline of 30 notable educators by textbook editor McGraw-Hill along with Confucius, Plato, Booker T. Washington, and Maria Montessori. She has been invited to speak at 350 colleges and universities and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show five times.
Criticism
The journalist Stephen G. Bloom has written about a variety of criticisms of Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes experiment, including those who argued that it risked psychological harm to children, leaving some feeling humiliated or anxious; that the experiment raised ethical concerns since students were subjected to intense role-playing without informed consent or safeguards; that it oversimplified racism by reducing it to eye color, ignoring the deeper systemic and historical dimensions of prejudice; that it provoked community backlash, with parents and townspeople accusing Elliott of traumatizing children and embarrassing her hometown; and that the experiment left a mixed legacy in diversity training, as later workshops based on the exercise were sometimes described as coercive or intimidating rather than constructive.
In addition to these criticisms, Bloom noted that Elliott often cited Robert Coles as praising her Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, claiming he said it was “the greatest thing to
come out of American education in a hundred years.” However, Bloom found no evidence for the validity of this quote, and has documented Coles' denial of ever making such a statement. From Bloom's perspective, this raised questions about Elliott’s credibility, since invoking Coles’ authority gave her experiment more legitimacy in academic and educational circles. She has done such training for corporations such as General Electric, Exxon, AT&T, and IBM, as well as lectured to the FBI, IRS, US Navy, US Department of Education, and US Postal Service.
Companies found the idea of offering such training attractive, not only because in the 1970s and 1980s there were increasing numbers of people of color in their organizations, but also because of U.S. court rulings and federal policies to promote multiculturalism brought about by pressure from civil rights groups during the same two decades.
Many companies at that time came to see diversity training as a way to ward off negative legal action and publicity. Elliott said, "If you can't think of any other reason for getting rid of racism, think of it as a real money saver." Elliott-inspired diversity training has been used outside the United States. When the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 passed in the United Kingdom, it listed 100 diversity training firms in the Diversity Directory. According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 70% of those firms have diversity policies in which diversity training plays a major role. Many of these courses follow Elliott's model in regards to understanding the issues presented.
Academic research
Academic research into Elliott's exercise shows moderate results in reducing long-term prejudice Two professors of education in England, Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes, argue that what Elliott did was unethical, calling the exercise psychologically and emotionally damaging. They also stated ethical concerns pertaining to the fact that the children were not told of the purpose of the exercise beforehand. In some courses, participants can feel frustrated about "their inability to change" and instead begin to feel anger against the very groups to which they are supposed to be more sensitive. It can also lead to anxiety because people become hyper-sensitive about being offensive or being offended. There appears to be a lack of very good measures for determining the long-term outcomes of these training initiatives.
Personal life
Elliott was married to Darald Elliott (1934–2013) from 1955 until his death, and she has four children.
In popular culture
Elliot and her experiment have been the subject of several documentaries and reenactments:
- The Eye of the Storm (1970)
- A Class Divided (Frontline, 1985)
- Blue Eyed (1996)
- The Angry Eye (2001)
- The Australian Eye (also known as The Stolen Eye; 2002)
- The Event: How Racist Are You? (Channel 4, 2009).
- Jane Elliott Against the World (2026)
See also
- The Third Wave (experiment)