by At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.
The mechanics were colder than any documentary suggests. We were lined up and sent to one side of the room or the other with no reason given for the sorting. We were handed paper armbands to wear all day, brown bands marked with a letter M and blue bands marked with a letter S, and no one told us what the letters stood for. I have always taken them to mean Master and Slave, printed large enough that any teacher in the building could read our rank at a glance, and the letters traded sides the next morning when the roles reversed. The exercise reached well past the classroom walls, following us into the cafeteria and onto the playground, where the other grades watched us wear our ranks, so the humiliation played out in public, in front of the rest of the school.
That first day, a brown-eyed boy ordered me to fetch him a drink of water. I stayed in my seat. He warned me that he would have to whip me if I did not obey, and I invited him to try. The threat went nowhere. He went instead to the teacher and complained that I was doing it wrong, and she agreed with him and announced that I would be punished “with the shame of history.” I was eight years old and had no notion of what those words meant. I watched my blue-eyed classmates bray like donkeys and grind through forced jumping jacks on command.
The next morning the roles flipped. Blue-eyed children now held the whip, and the brown-eyed children became the servants. I expected the reversal to cool tempers; it did the opposite. The newly empowered blue eyes poured a full day of stored resentment onto the brown eyes and invented harsher tasks than they had suffered: scrub the bathroom, crawl on all fours, run to the cafeteria for Kool-Aid on command. I would not take part in this either. The day before I had refused to obey; this time I refused to give the orders. When the teacher pressed me to order the minorities around so I could feel my power, I told her, “Not for me. Not my thing.” My mother taught fourth grade in that same building. When word reached her that I had failed the racism experiment, she punished me at home for refusing to play along. I did not care then, and I do not care now. I disliked the manipulation, and I disliked the smug certainty that cruelty could be assigned, scheduled, and graded.
That two-day spectacle had a name, a pedigree, and a national distribution network. It deserves a harder look than the warm one it usually gets, because the thing sold as empathy worked as obedience training, and the only person in my classroom punished for it was the eight-year-old who said no.
Where it came from
The exercise was the invention of Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa, a small, almost entirely white farming town near the Minnesota border. On the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a student asked Elliott why anyone would kill the man, and she answered with a game. She divided her class by eye color, told the brown-eyed children they were smarter and cleaner and better, and handed them privileges: second helpings at lunch, longer recess, the front of the room. She told the blue-eyed children the reverse and made them wear collars so the hierarchy stayed visible at a glance. To seal the deception she fabricated a biological excuse, informing the children that the melanin which darkened their eyes also sharpened their minds. The following day she inverted every assignment.
The journalist Stephen Bloom, whose 2021 University of California Press book “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality” remains the most thorough account, records what the celebratory retellings tend to skip. Elliott did not invent the eye-color device; others had tried versions of it before her, and her real gift lay in promotion. She ran the exercise on Riceville’s children for more than a decade, year after year, on a captive supply of eight-year-olds. Bloom’s reporting also corrects the gentle picture of the method. Elliott did more than sort the children by eye color; she coached the favored group to mock and belittle the rest. The local newspaper printed the compositions her students wrote about the experience, and those small-town essays are what first pulled the networks toward Riceville. Bloom documents the cost close to home as well: Elliott’s neighbors turned on her, fellow teachers stopped speaking to her, and her own children were beaten and taunted because of their mother’s lesson. The town resented the attention then and resents it now; when Bloom arrived to report, retired teachers refused to discuss her.
How it reached a classroom in Nebraska
A lesson confined to one Iowa schoolroom could never have reached me in Lincoln. A media machine carried it. In 1970 ABC News sent a producer and two camera crews to film Elliott’s class, and the resulting twenty-five-minute documentary, “The Eye of the Storm,” aired four times that year and won a George Foster Peabody Award. A bestselling book followed in 1971. Education Week later reported that schools could order 16mm prints and videocassettes of the ABC film through Guidance Associates and the Center for Humanities, which is the unglamorous mechanism by which a televised stunt becomes a lesson plan in a thousand districts. Elliott took her act onto Johnny Carson’s couch, then to a tense White House conference on children, and later to Oprah Winfrey’s stage. In 1985 the PBS series Frontline rebroadcast the footage in an episode called “A Class Divided,” added a reunion of the original students, and drew national acclaim. By the time a teacher in Nebraska decided to try the exercise on my class in 1973, she had a finished script to follow, one already filmed, praised, packaged, and mailed.
What the exercise actually taught
Strip away the documentary music and the reunion tears, and look at the mechanics. A teacher with total authority over small children told them a lie about their own bodies, assigned half of them to be inferior, and licensed the other half to humiliate them. Then she switched the labels and ran it again. Calling this a lesson about racism flatters it. The sentence my teacher used, “Now you know how it feels to be Black,” is the heart of the fraud. One scheduled afternoon of pretend, carrying the certainty that tomorrow the game ends and you go home to a family that loves you, has almost nothing in common with a life lived inside a system that does not switch off at the bell. The claim insults the experience it pretends to honor. Where the exercise ran in a room that did include a Black child, it asked that child to sit and watch white classmates perform a cartoon of their life for credit.
In my classroom there were no Black children at all, and that absence was the precondition the method required. They ran this on lily-white Midwestern children because we were the only audience it could work on. One Black child in that room would have collapsed the pretense, because for that child the lesson would have stopped being a game and turned real on the spot, and the rest of us would have seen it happen. The exercise needed children with no firsthand knowledge of the thing it claimed to teach, children who could be told what to think and what to feel and would comply. We complied.
The hierarchy held only where an adult stood over it. There were two third-grade classes, so we faced the rest of the school together, and whatever letter we wore, the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders saw all of us as the stupid little kids and treated us that way. Outside the classroom, the order the teachers had built with armbands and reversals meant nothing, because a real pecking order already ran the building, and it did not care about eye color. The manufactured cruelty was swallowed whole by the ordinary cruelty of older children, which the exercise had neither created nor addressed.
The deception makes it worse. Children that age trust a teacher’s factual claims the way they trust gravity. Telling them their eye color governs their intelligence does real damage: it plants a falsehood in minds with no defense against it, and it models the same habit the lesson claims to oppose, the assignment of human worth by physical trait. The coercion makes it worse still. None of us consented. None of our parents were asked. We were a captive audience inside a compulsory institution, and the one authority figure in the room had turned herself into the engine of the cruelty. A child who wanted out had nowhere to go.
Consider what that means at eight years old. The teacher is the most powerful adult in your daily life, the one who decides whether you eat first or last, whether you are praised or shamed, whether the note that goes home calls you good or bad. At that age the teacher’s word is the closest thing a child has to reality, and a verdict of inferiority delivered from that source lands as plain fact. Bloom’s reporting shows Elliott prompting the favored children to belittle the others and at times to start fights. The design built the cruelty in on purpose.
The reversal is where the official story and the truth part company. In Elliott’s celebrated telling, the children who had suffered on day one grew gentler when handed power on day two, because they remembered the sting. That is the version that makes the film uplifting, and it is not what happened in my classroom. Given the chance to retaliate, the formerly oppressed escalated. They had a day of grievance to discharge, and they discharged it with interest. Anyone who has watched a schoolyard knows which outcome is the likely one, and it is the outcome the inspirational edit leaves on the cutting-room floor.
Place the exercise beside the social psychology of its moment and the resemblance is hard to miss. Stanley Milgram had already shown, in experiments published in 1963, how readily ordinary people would inflict pain on the instruction of an authority figure. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison study in 1971 would soon show how fast the assigned roles of guard and prisoner curdle into abuse. Elliott was running the same demonstration of obedience and assigned power, except her subjects were grade-schoolers, there was no debriefing protocol worth the name, and the whole affair was staged for television. The discipline that produced those famous studies would, within a few years, be forced to reckon with the harm it had caused. The classroom exercise escaped that reckoning by calling itself a lesson.
The strongest case for it, and why it fails
Honesty requires taking on the best defense of the exercise. Its admirers point to the Frontline reunion, where Elliott’s grown former students sat together and credited the exercise with making them more decent adults, more alert to prejudice, less willing to look away. They point to Elliott’s evident sincerity; she believed, and still believes at past ninety, that white Americans will not understand racism until they are made to feel a version of it. They argue that moral education sometimes has to hurt, and that a comfortable lesson about fairness changes no one.
Weigh the claim plainly. The exercise is effective because discomfort does carve a memory deeper than a lecture, and some participants clearly carried away a lasting awareness of how quickly contempt can be manufactured. The exercise is not effective because a handful of moving testimonials, gathered at a reunion staged by the same filmmaker who built the legend, cannot tell you the net result. Children who were harmed, who came away more anxious or more cruel or simply more confused about their own worth, never get invited back to testify on camera. Self-selected praise tells you only that some people remember the experience fondly, which is a smaller claim than benefit and should not be mistaken for it. Sincerity settles nothing either, since sincere conviction has justified a great deal of harm to children across history. And the deepest objection outlasts every testimonial: a good cause does not dissolve the requirement of consent. If the lesson is sound, it can be taught to people who have agreed to learn it. Running it on eight-year-olds who could not refuse, then grading their compliance, teaches one durable thing above all, which is that authority may do as it likes to you so long as its intentions are pure.
How it faded, and who paid for it
The exercise lost its place in ordinary classrooms for reasons that had little to do with Elliott and much to do with a change in the rules of the country. In 1972 the Associated Press exposed the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the United States Public Health Service had watched Black men die of a treatable disease for forty years. The outrage produced the National Research Act, which President Nixon signed on July 12, 1974, creating a national commission to write ethical rules for research on human beings. In 1979 that commission issued the Belmont Report, which laid out three principles that still govern the field: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Informed consent moved from courtesy to requirement. Institutional review boards became the gatekeepers for any federally funded study, and deceiving and distressing minors without parental consent became indefensible inside the research world.
Here is the bitter mechanism its champions rarely admit. The exercise spread fastest in the window before those protections existed, roughly 1968 through the early seventies, which is precisely when it landed on my class. After the protections arrived, it survived by slipping through the gap between research and teaching. Review boards and the American Psychological Association’s ethics code bind researchers and licensed psychologists. A schoolteacher running a classroom activity counts as neither in the eyes of those rules, so no board ever reviewed what was done to us, and no code was ever enforced against it. Direct replication on children grew rare over time anyway, as the culture absorbed the plain idea that you do not experiment on minors for their own good without asking. The exercise mostly migrated to adult diversity training, where the participants at least arrive as volunteers.
The parents found out, and they were furious. Almost every family in that neighborhood was white, working-class, and conservative, most of the fathers on the line in the city’s plants, and not one of them had been asked or told before their children were sorted, labeled, and marched through it. The fury proved the lesson had failed. The exercise had just shown these parents, through their own sons and daughters, what it feels like to be ranked at the bottom by an accident of birth, and their answer was to demand that white children be spared it, voiced by at least one father in the slur the lesson was supposed to make unsayable. They had absorbed none of it.
The protest did not stop the school. The roles reversed on schedule the next morning, the armbands traded sides, and the second day ran like the first. They tried it on us once, in 1973, and never again, and I have come to believe the parents are the reason, white families refusing to let their children stand in the lower place even for two days. The thing that killed a lesson sold as a cure for racism was racism itself.
Which leaves the question I have carried since I was eight: was anyone ever punished for this? The plain answer is no. Discipline never touched Jane Elliott; she was decorated and enriched. The Peabody Award, a seat on Carson’s couch, the Oprah stage, the paid contracts with corporations including IBM, with government agencies and universities, a global circuit of diversity-training sessions built on the same two days. Bloom argues, with reason, that she became a foremother of the modern diversity-training industry, a commercial field descended from a stunt she first performed on eight-year-olds. A career of more than fifty years grew out of 1968. The teachers who copied her, including the one who ran me through it in Lincoln, faced no inquiry, no reprimand, no consequence of any kind. The accounting ran in one direction only. In my classroom, the single person punished for Discrimination Day was the grey-eyed boy who declined to enslave his classmates, and the sentence came from his own mother. Embarrassed in front of her teaching colleagues, she took a week of my television to teach me what it feels like to lose a privilege, never seeing that the stripping of privileges was the exact engine of the exercise she was defending. She was hazel-eyed, sorted with the blue-eyes by the experiment’s own rules, and she enforced the hierarchy anyway, like one of the brown-eyed bosses. Set that beside Elliott’s awards and you have the whole indictment: the celebrated adult, the punished child, and a parent replaying the lesson at the kitchen table without ever recognizing it.
The freedom they taught against
I have thought for half a century about what that lesson taught me, and it is the reverse of what it intended. It taught me that manipulation does not turn noble by wearing the costume of virtue. Training people to obey cruelty in a good cause is still training people to obey cruelty, and the habit, once learned, does not pause to check the worthiness of the next command. A child marched into a rigged game and ordered to feel another person’s pain on schedule learns no empathy at all, because empathy cannot be conscripted. What he learns is that the powerful may rewrite the rules whenever their hearts are in the right place, which is the oldest excuse in the catalog of harm. The grey-eyed boy who looked at his teacher and said, “Not for me. Not my thing,” had hold of something the adults running the experiment had forgotten. With the television gone for the week, I took my punishment by reading instead, and I have never run out of that particular freedom since. The smallest unit of freedom is the right to refuse the game, even when everyone you know is playing, even when the refusal costs you. I have never once regretted paying it.
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