Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. For the past fifty two years, teacher and diversity trainer Jane Elliott has been stirring up trouble on the subject of racism. It can still be uncomfortable to squirm in your seat, stare at your shoes, uncomfortable when she subjects someone to the very same exercise she first unleashed on third graders more than half a century ago, but designed to expose racist thinking. Something her
method can get downright mean. But again, the subject is racism, it should be troubling. Elliott came to prominence when, the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In she, herself a white woman, took her classroom of all white third graders in Riceville, Iowa, and decided to teach them what it was like to face discrimination. She separated the kids into two groups, those with brown eyes and those with blue and proceeded to proclaim the brown
eyes the superior group. She allowed the group extra privileges, more time at recess seats at the front of the room. They were told they were cleaner, smarter, more talented, how the children reacted to this newfound pecking order was startling. The brown eyed group immediately began to wield their dominance. The blue eyes almost immediately slipped into the role of subordinates. Anger flared disputes popped up after switching roles a few days later, which gave both sides of the classroom a
taste of being in the lesser group. The exercise ended. Many parents complained after reading about what had happened in Elliott's classroom through student essays printed in the local paper. A month or so later, Johnny Carson invited Elliott to appear on his late night talk show. She became a national story. Many praised her efforts at opening her students eyes,
but not everybody. A two five stories Maisonian magazine reported hundreds of viewers wrote letters saying Elliot's work appalled them. How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children? One said, Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there's no way they could possibly understand it. It's cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage. Elliott spoke with us for the article that this episode is based on from her home in Iowa.
She said, you think that's traumatizing, try living that way for a lifetime. Elliott taught for years before she decided to take her anti racism lesson out of the classroom and into corporate America. She's also led the exercise for the U. S Department of Education and other governmental groups. She's appeared before numerous church and school assemblies. She was on Oprah Winfrey's TV show several times. In June, she
appeared on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. She often faces uncomfortable and sometimes angry reactions, but her goal, as it has been for the past fifty two years, is education. She says it's the best weapon against racism, but good
education about racism and race is hard to find. Elliott said that's because the educators believed the same thing that they were taught, and they were taught the same thing that I was, which is that there are three or four different races, and you can tell what a man's intelligence is by the color of his skin or the shape of his head. You can't lead people out of ignorance if you're still teaching. The Columbus discovered America, and we came here to civilize these savages. We need to
teach the three rs of rights, respect, and responsibility. If teachers would respect the rights of those students to learn the truth and be held responsible for seeing that they present them with the truth, we could kill racism in two generations. There's not a doubt in my mind that that could be done. Elliott, at eight seven years old,
has seen America grapple with racism all her life. She's marked major mile posts in the struggle over the past fifty years or so, the Civil rights movement and the assassination of Dr King in the sixties. The race. It's in Miami's Liberty City in eight and in Los Angeles after Rodney King beating in the protests, in Ferguson, Missouri, in after the killing of Michael Brown, and in Baltimore, Maryland after that of Freddy Gray, and in Charleston, South
Carolina that same year after a church massacre. There are many others, but the problem she has been relentlessly attacking, Elliott says, goes far beyond the occasional race based flora. For people of color in the United States, facing down racism is an everyday fight, every minute of every day Elliott said, it's only been going on with me for
fifty two years. I know black women who have been doing this for eighty nine years, and their mothers did, and their grandmothers did, and their great grandmothers did, and their daughters and their granddaughters and their great granddaughters are going to have to do it unless we get off our polly unsaturated fatty acids and do something about this. I get paid to talk about it. They aren't even
allowed to talk about out it. One of the biggest hurdles in educating people about racism in the United States, Elliott says, is that most everyone knows it exists and knows that it's harmful, but few are motivated to change it. She has stood in front of classes and asked who among the white people in the room would want to switch places with the black person. No one ever volunteers. She cautions that recognizing the problem is only the first step,
but Elliott is nothing if not persistent. She says she'll continue to educate for the next fifty years. She'll push her mantra of one race. The science behind the simple
words is clear. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, your genome the body's blueprint that contains all of your DNA is nine percent the same as every human around you, And she says she will urge people to get out and vote this November and hope of electing leaders who will attack racism as she has head on m. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler clay Or. More on this and lots of other topics.
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