This week Dr. Ole Swenson, director of the University of Wisconsin Research Lab for Anthropological Studies reluctantly announced that after 30 years of study, there is undeniable proof that blue-eyed individuals are not as smart as those with brown eyes.

Dr. Swenson, a blue-eyed man of European descent, explained that civilization began in the central regions of what is now Africa, where the sun is hot and intense. The first known peoples were protected from the rays of the sun by great amounts of melanin that made their skin and eyes brown. Over the centuries as tribes moved further north where the sun’s rays were not so direct, the skin and eye color gradually lightened. Unfortunately as the eye color lightened, the sun’s rays penetrated through the eyes and burned off some of the brain cells of the blue-eyed people.

Dr. Swenson said he now understands why he had to work harder in graduate school than his brown-eyed friends did.

In a related announcement, Dr. Jose Lopez, President of UW-Madison, announced he will be limiting the hiring of blue-eyed faculty members to 10% of the new hires. Furthermore, only brown-eyed students will qualify for university scholarships. Lopez said, “We want to provide an excellent education for those most equipped to succeed. We will generously reserve 10% of our faculty positions in order to provide jobs for the ignorant blue-eyed professors.”

The fictitious scenarios presented above are a take off on an exercise conducted by Jane Elliott in 1970. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., third grade teacher Ms. Elliott tried to explain the meaning of King’s death to her white students. Elliott had heard that during World War II the Nazis used eye color to determine who was sent to the gas chamber or not. Based on this Elliot created a Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise to teach her students about prejudice and racism. “I chose a physical characteristic over which they had no control and attributed negative elements to this characteristic.”

On the first day, Elliott told her students that those with blue eyes had superior intelligence and they received extra classroom privileges. The brown-eyed students were inferior and had no such privileges. In Jane’s video “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” we observe the blue-eyed children oppressing the others while the brown-eyed children exhibited feelings of self-loathing and fear.

The next day, Elliott told the students that she had made a mistake, that it was brown-eyed students who were superior. The situation quickly reversed with the brown-eyed children who had been oppressed the day before, now taking on the role of the oppressors.

This exercise in oppression was not popular with parents in the all white community in Iowa. In her video “Eye of the Storm”, made 15 years later, Elliott tells of the harassment she and her family received. The video also features an update on the children and how the experiment affected them.

Jane Elliott is now a diversity trainer in schools and corporations. In her most recent video, “Blue Eyed” she conducts a powerful version of the original exercise with adults in a one-day workshop. Jane doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Each and every statement is challenged. It’s obvious that she is very serious about combating racism. Jane’s website states that prejudice and bigotry is an “irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this does not apply to you...you are in for a rude awakening.”

Jane’s website http://www.janeelliott.com includes learning materials with typical modern day racist statements (such as “I don’t see you as Black”) along with clarifications of what is really being said. The link on Learning Materials includes many other typical statements that could lead to great discussions and an increased understanding of racism and white privilege.


~Louise Lovdahl
(WWTW) Delavan, WI, Oct 1993

Louise, a white woman, is a counselor at a racially mixed urban high school of 2500 students in Kenosha, WI. Her greatest teachers are the students of color at her high school, Visions consultants Thomas Griggs and Wekesa Madzimoyo, and the awakenings provided in the Issues and Isms workshops. She is the secretary for the Delegate Council (governing board) of the MKP/WW Multicultural Council.