How Racist Are You? – Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise
These 30 people have never met. By the days end, they may wish they never had. For one long day they’ll be at the mercy of “The Bitch”, a retired American teacher. Some would say she calls herself this way for good reason. For 40 years Jane Elliott (A Class Divided) has been running an exercise that has ignited controversy around the world. She says it lays bare the hidden truth about racism in white societies.
Many disagree, some vehemently. Now she’s bringing her extreme methods and message to modern Britain. She’s about to divide this group. Her aim: Simulate a racist apartheid style regime. Will the British people accept her regime or stand up to it? Does it reveal that we’re all more racist than we’d like to admit? How Racist Are You? is a documentary investigating one of the most taboo subjects in society.
Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it 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.
In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. over thirty years ago, Jane Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. This, now famous, exercise labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.
Everyone who is exposed to Jane Elliott’s work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it. “It won’t help much to be prepared to face Jane Elliott. This elderly woman will tear down any shield. Even we, the spectators in BLUE EYED, can’t get rid of this feeling of uneasiness, embarrassment, anxiety and utterly helpless hatred when she starts keeping people down, humiliating them, deriding them, incapacitating them.
No doubt about this: for three quarters of the time in this documentation Jane Elliott is the meanest, the lowest, the most detestful, the most hypocritical human being hell has ever spit back on earth. But she should be an example for all of us”. – Stuttgarter Zeitung Visit Official Site: JaneElliot.com
