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Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Exercise | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN (466 hits)

Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Exercise | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN

In this 1992 Oprah Show episode, award-winning anti-racism activist and educator Jane Elliott taught the audience a tough lesson about racism by demonstrating just how easy it is to learn prejudice. Watch as the audience, totally unaware that an exercise is underway, gets separated into two groups based on the color of their eyes. The blue-eyes group was discriminated against while the people with brown eyes were treated with respect. Jane says she first started this exercise in her third grade class back in 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For more on #oprahwinfreyshow, visit WatchOWN.tv/TOWS

Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Tuesday, November 15th 2022 at 1:13PM
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Motivation to teach about racism's effects

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Elliott turned on her television and learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She says she vividly remembers a scene in which a white reporter pointed his microphone toward a local black leader and asked things like "When our leader [John F. Kennedy] was killed several years ago, his widow held us together. Who's going to control your people?"

Elliott then decided to combine a lesson she had planned about Native Americans with a lesson she had planned about Martin Luther King Jr. for February's Hero of the Month project. At the moment she was watching the news of King's death, Elliott says she was ironing a teepee for use in a lesson unit about Native Americans. To tie the two lessons together, she used the Sioux prayer "Oh great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins." She wanted to give her small-town, all-white students the experience of walking in a "colored child's moccasins for a day".

Tuesday, November 15th 2022 at 1:24PM
Dea. Ron Gray Sr.