By Artur

In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an interesting experiment with implications on prejudice and discrimination was conducted in an elementary school classroom. After a student asked Jane Elliot about MLK Jr., she decided to try the experiment out. Its results, in my mind, say something about human nature.

On the first day, Elliot explained to the kids that blue eyed students were superior to the students. She began running her classroom in a way that segregated kids based on eye color, and clearly favoring the blue eyed kids. The brown eyed students, who were told to wear brown fabric around their necks, resisted until given a (made-up) scientific explanation by Elliot. The blue-eyed students began acting arrogantly and had a nasty attitude towards the brown eyed students. They also began doing better in class, even those students who had previously been poor students. Conversely, the brown eyed students regressed in class, even those who had excelled before, and became less social outside of class. The following Monday, Elliot had explained that she was mistaken and it was actually brown eyed students that were superior. Afterwards, the roles reversed and it was the brown eyes students who became arrogant and academically superior, while blue eyed students regressed. Furthermore, Brown eyed students began treating blue eyed students similarly to the way they were treated the previous week. 

What does an experiment like this imply? It seems that young kids cling to differences they are told make them better or worse than others. They begin to act in ways that fulfill those differences, such as getting better grades because they were told their eyes made them smarter. If you convince  child that a stereotype is true, they will act in ways that make it true. So why does this matter? Think of everything in society that tells a black student, a homosexual person, a woman, an impoverished individual, etc. that they are somehow inferior to someone else. Then the reasoning offered behind it is the grades these “inferior” students receive, or the way they carry themselves, or their economic situations, etc. Yet these claims lose all legitimacy as they are the causes of themselves. The claims that certain groups are inferior make them inferior. This is the less problematic revelation of the experiment. 

The worrisome part of the experiment is how quickly and strongly the kids internalized what Jane Elliot told them. Within less than a week the eye color of these kids dominated their identities, even though it pit them on opposite sides with some of their friends. The experiment hints at the idea that differences are the most defining parts of our identity, especially when people are told they have implications on their status. This was a simple experiment by a schoolteacher. Imagine this experiment were to continue? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous is we discriminated against each other based on eye color? If the answer is yes, then why is it not ridiculous when it’s race? Why is it not when it’s gender? Why Is it not, ever?