Jane Elliott

'''Jane Elliott''' is an Free ringtones USA/American former Majo Mills teacher and now Mosquito ringtone anti-racism Sabrina Martins activist who, in the wake of the Nextel ringtones assassination of Abbey Diaz Martin Luther King Jr., developed a famous simple, yet revealing, exercise that explored the nature of Free ringtones racism and Majo Mills prejudice.

The creation of the Brown eye/Blue eye exercise

In Mosquito ringtone 1968, Jane Elliott was an Sabrina Martins elementary school teacher in her all-White hometown of Cingular Ringtones Riceville, Iowa. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been a "hero of the month" in Elliott’s fourth-grade class, because Elliott believed that "what he was doing was right for all of us, not just for Blacks." When King was shot, her students wanted to know why their "hero" had been killed. Elliott took the opportunity to discuss weaver razzing race with her students.

She queried the kids on what they knew about weeklong outbreak African Americans, considering none had ever met one. Their responses were unconsciously racist: "They’re dirty," "They stink," "They don’t smell good," "They riot, they steal," "You can’t trust them, my dad says they better not try to move in next door to us."

Elliott decided to administer a racial yorkers heller reality check. She divided the class into two groups: the brown eyes and the blue eyes. Anyone not fitting these categories, such as those with green or hazel eyes, was an outsider, not actively participating in the exercise. Elliott told her children that brown-eyed people were superior to blue-eyed, due to the amount of the color-causing-chemical, melanin, in their blood.

She said that blue-eyed people were stupid and lazy and not to be trusted. To ensure that the eye color differentiation could be made quickly, Elliott passed out strips of cloth that fastened at the neck as collars. The brown eyes gleefully affixed the cloth-made shackles on their blue-eyed counterparts.

Elliott withdrew her blue-eyed students’ basic classroom rights, such as drinking directly from the water fountain or taking a second helping at lunch. Brown-eyed kids, on the other hand, received preferential treatment. In addition to being permitted to boss around the blues, the browns were given an extended recess.

Elliott recalls, "It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were." Within 30 minutes, a blue-eyed girl named Carol had regressed from a "brilliant, self-confident carefree, excited little girl to a frightened, timid, uncertain little almost-person."

On the flip side, the brown-eyed children excelled under their newfound superiority. Elliott had seven students with dyslexia in her class that year and four of them had brown eyes. On the day that the browns were "on top," those four brown-eyed boys with dyslexia read words that Elliott "knew they couldn’t read" and spelled words that she "knew they couldn’t spell."

Seeing her brown-eyed students act like "arrogant, ugly, domineering, overbearing White Americans" with no instructions to do so proved to Elliott that racism is learned. Prior to that day in 1968, her students had expressed neither positive nor negative thoughts about each other based on eye color. Yes, Elliott taught them that it was all right to judge one another based on eye color. But she did not teach them how to oppress. "They already knew how to be racist because every one of them knew without my telling them how to treat those who were on the bottom," says Elliott.

Local public reaction
That day, Elliott discovered that "you can create racism. And, as with anything, if you can create it, you can destroy it." For 14 out of the next 16 years that Elliott taught in Riceville, she conducted the exercise. In the White enclave of Riceville, fighting racism was not looked upon by most as an honorable duty. As a result of her work, kids beat up her own children. Her parents’ business lost customers. Elliott and her family received regular death threats. And each fall, parents called Elliott’s principal and said, "I don’t want my kid in that nigger-lover’s classroom!"

Not everyone was against Elliott. She believes that 80 percent of the people in Riceville were compassionate, caring people who were concerned about their school and their kids and their community. But, says Elliott, the 20 percent, the vocal, vicious minority, intimidated the rest of them. It seemed as though the only Ricevilleans strong enough to stand up to this vicious minority were Elliott’s students. After participating in the exercise, says Elliott, her students went home and argued with their fathers about racism. Imagine: 8-year-old children telling their parents that they were wrong.

In the early core tai 1980s, however, Elliott was denied an unpaid leave to run the exercise for a corporation's employees, and decided to retire from teaching and take her people argue anti-racism crusade on the road. She thus reinvented herself as a "diversity trainer," a PC term for traveling the world challenging racist thoughts and behaviors. But while she may have left the classroom behind, Elliott retained the demeanor of a strict, slightly overbearing grade-school teacher.

Today Elliott uses her strong presence and feistiness to capture the attention of college kids and adults in corporate America and Europe. She speaks at colleges about racism and performs the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise at the request and cost of companies that feel the need for some "diversity training." Elliott became famous for her work appearing on such diverse fulcrum of television shows ''deputy ted The Tonight Show'', ''sharpton continues Oprah'' and ''greater threat 60 Minutes''.

Elliott has noted that the major difference between exercise participants today and her fourth-grade students of 30 years ago is that, now, people are "less likely to use the word ‘nigger.’ To that end, she still uses her teachings to show how prejudice can exist in a subtle fashion.

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