Antisocial studies with Jane Elliott.🤔

Blue eyes, brown eyes: What Jane Elliott's famous experiment says about race 50 years on. Jane Elliott is 84 years old, a tiny woman with white hair, wire-rim glasses and little patience.

She has been talking about how ridiculous it is to judge someone based on the color of their skin for almost 50 years. She can hardly believe she still has to say it.

“We need to fix this,” she says.

Elliot is best known as the teacher who, on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, put her third-grade students through a bold exercise to teach them about racial prejudice.

She divided the children, who were all white, by eye color, and then she told the children that people with brown eyes were smarter, faster and better than those with blue eyes.

What happened next proved to Elliot that prejudice is a learned behavior.

Which means, she says, it can be unlearned.

It was an exercise that would catapult her into a heated national discussion, land her on television and in newspapers, and eventually make her the subject of a half-dozen documentaries and a mainstay in textbooks.

All these years later, Elliott hasn't stopped talking about what she learned. She thinks her message is more important than ever amid growing conflict over race. She minces no words. She wants you to listen. Really listen.

Maybe you will learn something, too.

One race, the human race